The Good Old Times

LOST settlers had, sooner or later, to get their living from the land, not from the sea nor by the sea-road, so the town lots of the shore footholds acquired a growing fringe of farm acres, and ad­ditional centres of occupation multiplied inland. There much of the earliest experience was repeated.

Little of definite home-making was achieved on the goldfields or in the gum country, although they enter vitally into any adequate tale of this; however, those other centres were occupied by settlers whose quality as builders of a new British nation was equal to the task.

Not all the early immigrants were altogether of the right sort—this would have been too much to expect, human nature being what it is—but the general standard was high; at first the exacting conditions to be faced were a test of courage to those wanting to come, and afterwards, when im­migration was organised, wise selection was the rule. To a remarkable degree, the pioneers were resourceful, putting their hands to work very different from that to which they had been accustomed, and making the most of every oppor­tunity.

Looking back to ‘ the good old times’ when first he came to New Zealand, Manning writes with more than a tinge of regret, ‘ The men were bigger and stouter in those days; and the women—ah!’ It is a good note on which to end this tale, for his words are an attempt to do justice to the heroic past, but there is a better ending. For many a day after that of which he wrote—indeed, right up to the eighties, when the era of special settlements reached its climax—examples of pioneering courage were fre­quent, and memory of them is not beyond our power to recapture.