384 TUTIRA 



manuka ; here has been added to the local flora a new orchid, here a 

 fresh alien has been discovered. Always there looms ahead the golden 

 chance of such another find. Not one of a thousand rides on the 

 station has been the duplicate of another; each has been for forty 

 years a fresh page in the story to be continued in our next of the 

 overthrow of the old world, and the slow re-establishment of a new 

 equilibrium. Each ride too has supplied some hint for the remodelling 

 of station management. None, moreover, but pleasant memories re- 

 main even the disasters of the past retain not their sting, but the 

 remembrance of the antidote applied. Addison wrote of his mistress, 

 that to love her was a liberal education ; to care truly for a bit of land 

 anywhere the world over is a liberal education. 1 With this last change 

 in the r61e of owner from workman to inspector of the work of others, 

 station life from a sociological point of view passed into its final stage, 

 the period of flux had ceased. One last great transformation, as yet 

 however uncontemplated, lay dark in the womb of time, a change 

 destined to take place on every large sheep station in New Zealand. 



For the last thirty-five or forty years the Governments of New 

 Zealand good, bad, indifferent have agreed on one point, that the 

 creation of a class of substantial yeoman farmers is beneficial to the 

 colony firstly, on the ground that a rural population is required ; 



1 In youth's gay morn a man may possess land, in later life the land may possess him ; 

 the writer, circumstanced amongst friends virulently solicitudinous for the station's weal, 

 barely evades his frankenstein. Though not yet devoured by this monster of his own 

 creation, the station dominates his life, for always it comes first. His head shepherd, out 

 of his thousands' increase every spring, grudges him a single prime lamb for the table. He 

 is fobbed off with poor, pitiful, half-fat black brutes " blacks must be eaten, they spoil the 

 look of the station lambs." For mutton he will be given tough old ewes which, if offered 

 for sale, "would ruin the appearance of a good station line." His wife for a Scottish 

 household too ! has to beg sheeps'-heads like a mendicant ; his daughter deliver my darling 

 from the power of the dog sobs for sweetbreads, they are " required for the station collies." 

 He has been forced to pay off his mortgage "tojree the station." He cannot debit a door- 

 scraper to the run but his book-keeper is up in arms cross-questioning him as to "what interest 

 the station can have in its purchase" as to whether it is not a " luxury " which, " on a station 

 run as a station pure and simple, could not be quite well dispensed with." Advice is lavished as 

 to the amount " the station can let him have " each year. Posed by a balance-sheet over which 

 he attempts to appear intelligent, he smothers a sigh for the good old-fashioned ledger of the 

 'eighties with its simple entries National Mortgage and Agency Co. . 9750 



Captain Russell .... 5 



and all the nothings added. He understood them anyway. Then again, at the very suggestion, 

 say, of some public-spirited scheme such as the utilisation of the ram paddock for an aviary, 

 not one of his friends of twenty and thirty years' standing but would go back on him. 

 Harry Young, omitting his customary benediction of "Well, ta-ta," would spark off in a rage. 

 Jack Young, after a preliminary observation on the continued excellence of the weather, 

 would swear it was impossible ; Charlie Patterson would wag his red beard in negation ; 

 as for George Whatley, he would say nothing, one look would be enough one of those 

 frightful looks that have for years made him the real boss of the run. 



