WITH THE CO-OPERATIVE TUNNELLERS
By Jean Devanny
Stopping the car at the top of Wainui Hill, we looked back at the charming panorama inviting an appreciation impossible to withhold. Directly behind us, far below, lay Petone flat, on it the sprawling township desirefully and picturesquely endeavouring to merge itself into the outer confines of its sister township, Lower Hutt. And the bay! That wonderful bay with its broad expanse and mountainous background so unappreciated by the majority of Wellingtonians.
At this time of the morning, when old Sol was fully awake and beginning to exult in realisation of his own strength, that bay was a vision of utter beauty. We had travelled along its shore at sunrise, when its pale waters were gently stirring in languorous efforts to rouse themselves from night’s hebetude, and throwing upwards a filmy mist with which the rays of the newly risen, honey-coloured sun toyed and coquetted until the hills opposite and the ships at anchorage took on ever varying tints of mauve, rose, gold, and a dozen blues.
Now, at ten o’clock, from the summit of Wainui Hill not a wraith or vestige of mist was visible. The ships, it is wonderful how lovely a mere ship can be, the ships at the wharves and in the stream were diminished by distance into insignificance, mere smudges in a sea of dancing golden flecks.
We dragged ourselves from contemplation of this fascinating scene, and surveyed the valley into which we were intending to drop, blinking at the sudden transition from sun-kissed dancing waters and enchanted hills of blue to the sea of billowing mist which must presently engulf us. Damp and cold it was too, but within half an hour our car had left it all behind, and we had drawn up at the caretaker’s cottage at the entrance to the water reserve, exclaiming with delight at the beauty of the finished hills and grassy lawns surrounding Morton’s Dam.
Two years ago the road ended at the dam, but when the waterworks scheme to be put through by Mr Semple’s party of co-operative tunnellers came into operation, it was necessary to make a cart track a mile through the heavy forest to the hillside, and there clear sufficient ground on which to build the camp.
Never will I forget my first walk along that cart track. On each side great rātā, beeches, and rimu rear their vast heights, the latter’s handsome, catkin-like foliage graciously inclining in thankfulness towards its Mother Earth. And the mosses and leather ferns so delicately luxuriating. The intertwining supplejack, with its leaves of darkest green, in sharp contrast to the shameless scarlet of the abundant berries. The road, with its paving of blue sandstone, ever winding away like a ribbon fetched from the peeping heavens above.
And lo! From out of the thick undergrowth screening the banks there suddenly leapt a wild goat, a magnificent black billy. Right into a shaft of sunlight he sprang, and stood facing us with long beard and surprised, enquiring eyes. Then, at our call, with contemptuous deliberation, he clambered up the bank and disappeared.
The Workmen’s Quarters
At the camp the quarters were astonishingly up to date and comfortable. A modern camp indeed. Beaver-board huts, a cookhouse equipped with every convenience, hot and cold water service, electric light, telephone, etc. A fine dining room, in which not the least attraction in this fall weather is the great fireplace built to accommodate huge logs. Certainly one did not expect in a midwood camp to sit down to tables laden with cut glass and silver.
From the camp one looked up to the tip-head, and instead of an unsightly blotch upon the landscape, as tip-heads usually are, this one was all added beauty. For in place of the usual muck and slush, the trucks here spill out the clean blue sandstone, which, spread fan-wise and glimpsed through the green, blends harmoniously with the general effect.
One stood about the camp and looked and listened, content to merely feast one’s eyes and absorb the peace and quiet; to allow the throaty, now single tui notes to make music in one’s soul, and the gentle, gurgling swish of the stream on either side lend balm to the city-tortured spirit.
The punga and the mamaku uprear their slender stems with their feathered crowns in thick profusion on these slopes of Orongo, and at this fall of the year the rata, vitiated to palest scarlet indeed through malingering, yet flaunts its passionate bloom high up.
The Tunnel
Our feet were protected from stumbling by light from a row of electric bulbs. Fifteen hundred feet of the hill has already been driven through. We wished to watch the miners at work, and scrambled up on to the mass of rock being loaded into the trucks by the shovellers.
Here we sat or knelt and watched the Ingersoll-Levner water drill bore the holes, about fourteen to a shot, to be charged with the explosive. The noise of the machine, driven by compressed air, is deafening, and the earth shakes with its vibration.
This machine, the compulsory use of which in quartz mining in this country was brought about through the instrumentality of Mr Semple, in giving a practical demonstration of it in comparison with the old machine in Parliament grounds before the people’s representatives, is a great improvement on the old Ingersoll machine.
The dust difficulty which formerly caused the death under dreadful conditions of hundreds of miners is by this machine practically eliminated. Through the drill, which was formerly solid, there runs a constant stream of water, which sprays the hole as the bore advances.
We retreated from the face with alacrity, our fingers blocking our ears. Standing back a few yards we watched the work going on through the clammy mist given off by the machines. Wet underfoot, in dim light, for the electric bulbs must be kept a good distance back from the exploding charge, with the incessant thunder of the machines rattling their nerves, we wondered at these toil-worn craftsmen who, with man-made implements, laboriously conquer the earth and make it man’s.
In the glory of a perfect eventide we walked back to Morton’s Dam to see the many red deer that came out to browse on the grassy slopes which reach to the water’s edge. They do not fear man at all, having no occasion to on this reserve. The great stags rear their many-pointed antlers and challenge our right of invasion, and the dainty young fawns survey us from the protection of their does with complacency and liquid, disarming eyes.
We returned to camp in the purple dusk and gathered round roaring fires of beech and rata to listen to the yarns of the old-timers. Suddenly there is a tremendous racket on the roof, a tearing up and down the verandah, and the scream as of a stuck pig. We uninitiated jump with fright, but are informed that it is only the possums at their nightly gambols.
We are quite excited, we town dwellers, and steal outside to watch. No need for caution, however, for the little beggars, attracted by the pig buckets and the gleam of the light high up above the wood pile, come quite near. Such lovely things they are, such dainty, furry, loveable little creatures; yet, if necessary, they can inflict grievous wounds with their pink-palmed little hands.
Robed handsomely in coats of grey, brown, or black, they fall and gambol, marauding even the storeroom if the door be inadvertently left open.
How wonderful is night in this little amphitheatre in the forest. The great dark trees rising, ever creeping upwards to a dark, brooding sky. And of a sudden a low, muffled rumbling tells of the back shift’s activities. We look up towards the tip-head and marvel. A ghostly mist clings tremulously to the giant rātā and rimu, and through it, mellowed and yellowed, glow incongruously the electric lights, artificial, strange and seemingly afloat, while all about one clings the pungent, aromatic scent of unknown plants, the damp earthy smells of the bush, and peace, the pure, serene peace of nature resting.
The following morning we rose early, and set out to cross the four-mile pack track leading over Orongo to the camp at the outer side of the hill. It had rained during the night, but now the air was shining and the mountain air, bracing us, set us in good time. The first mile up the hill was awful, ankle-deep in sticky yellow mud from which it was difficult to extricate oneself. But once on the harder footing we were able to enjoy to the utmost the wonder around us.
The shining myriads of leaves breathlessly still; the whirr of the pigeon’s flight as our advance startled it; the harsh, scolding scream of the kaka. But by and by we became so fatigued that the mere effort of climbing absorbed all one’s thought.
We moistened our parched lips at the trickles of water which in heavy weather become small torrents, until we reached the bluff round which the tunnellers informed us they had great difficulty in hewing out a road. We rested. The cliff descended sheerly further down than we could see, and above almost as steeply. One slip by a toiling workman, and one hardly cares to imagine it.
Looking down into Orongo’s fastnesses from this bluff we could hear, but not feel, the ever increasing volume of the wind sounds continually rushing up the gorges and through the gap in the mountain top. From hundreds of feet below floated up the plaintive bleating of the kids.
Another spurt, and we reached the trig station on the top, 2,500 feet above sea level.
The vegetation on this mountain top is not pleasant, somehow. There is no undergrowth of any size. Further down all was beauty, the cheery green and citrine tints ranging from a delicacy almost transparent to a rich depth of colour. But here, above the snow line, all was of the sombre, blackish greens of sunless unhealth.
Eerie and uncanny sort of vegetation it seemed to me, with its thick trunks forked at the top but sending out never a branch or a leaf, and covering their famine-like, spectral nakedness with heavy, fog-blackened mosses six inches thick.
And here also, proliferating to an incredible extent, was the fringed kidney fern, which I never could persuade myself was a pleasant sort of plant. It is everywhere, not only on the top of Orongo but down on the back slopes as well.
No, even on a bright, sunlit morning, and despite the fact that one could look over Cook Strait, across Wellington, and on the other side see the mirage-like Wairarapa lying in state, I do not consider the top of Orongo a desirable spot.
What it must have been for Mr Semple’s party last winter, clawing out this pack track in the teeth of raging gales, snow a foot deep all round, sleeping in wet blankets, in tents which were sometimes lifted clean away by the wind from the steep hill slope on which they were lashed, one can only imagine.
The one redeeming feature of the vegetation is the presence also of the graceful Prince of Wales feather fern. Quite charming and delightful this plant is.
In an hour and a half, very good going, we had reached:
The Camp on Orongo River
Three camps are installed here. The surveyors, numbering three men; the council camp of 21 workers doing the outside work; and Mr Semple’s party of tunnellers, at present numbering only six men.
We were warmly welcomed and well fed. The rugged beauty of the scenery over there beggars description, but, needless to say, the men do not consider the life anything to write home about. Eight hours a day of hard toil in cold muck and slush under almost primeval conditions of life is not conducive to the development of the artistic sense, and though I would have liked nothing better than the chance of segregating myself for a week or two in such wonderful country, I could quite understand their sarcastic, if good-humoured, remarks about “scenery as a diet.”
What admirable fellows these bushmen are. How resilient. How they rise above the sordid dreariness of their daily toil and refuse to bow the knee to fate.
It is a big work, this tunnel, and things will be much better for the men at the other end when the machinery is set up and the huts built. At present the tunnellers are boring with hand steel, which, of course, is mighty hard work. A regular little beehive the place is now. It is astonishing to come on it out of the hills. It gives one a sense of unreality.
We started for the main camp again at two o’clock, feeling as fit as fiddles. It is impossible to feel tired for more than a few minutes in this air.
We started up a huge, only-horned white billy goat on the way home, and a little brown kid, evidently lost, plaintively ran down the hill towards us and followed us up again for a mile, crying piteously.
The only native inhabitant of the bush we did not glimpse was a pig. The men had shot a 60 lb young one over in the mountains a day or two before. They are fine eating now that their food is in part berries.
Well, we are back in town now, a bit stiff, and the impact of the hard pavement beneath our feet is hateful. Wonderful Wainui, which the aggregate Wellingtonian does not even know exists.
To-night we shall sleep without the soothing rustle of your clear, limpid streams, and in the morning we shall not wake to the vision through the ever-open door of the flower-like foliage of the bush, silver, black, or brown, and trunks of pale-hued beech.
And the hospitality of the tunnelling party. Men as splendid physically as the giants of the forest around them. Generosity and fondness such as one never forgets. They are part and parcel, inextricably interwoven with the environment which in the progress of mankind they are adapting to themselves.
