"I hate rushes," muttered Bill as he sat down to tea.  "Their roots are so tough.  And if you make a hard jab and get through them, the dirty water splashes all over you or the swamp seems to suck the shovel down and you fall on your face."
"I know," said Fred sympathetically.  "But there doesn't seem to be any way of getting rid of rushes except digging them up and stacking them to dry. Next summer we'll be able to burn them."
"It would be much easier to help milk the cows." said Bill.
"No," explained Fred. "You are here under the 4b Unemployment Relief Scheme, and can only be employed on farm improvement work. We give you your meals and a bed and the government pays half your wages. I can't ask you to do any routine jobs nor clean out drains either, but you could dig new ones if that would make the land more productive. Our Drainage Board has been able to suggest to several farmers who want us to put in a new drain, that they get the work done under the 4b Scheme.
Esther Williamson turned to the older worker who had slipped quietly into his place, "How are your hands, Jim?"
Silently Jim turned his hands over to show the angry blisters right across the palms. Some of them were broken, and the skin was hanging, red and sore.
"I am not  used  to this kind of  work," he said." I am a qualified architect and had just started with a firm in Lincoln, but when things got so bad in Britain, most of us lost our  jobs, so I came out  to New Zealand because we were told conditions were so much better here. I suppose digging rushes is more useful than standing on street corners hoping for something to do - and the meals are nicer than what you get at a soup kitchen," and he smiled at the farmer's wife who had handed him a plate piled with vegetables and well cooked mutton.
"We may as well eat our sheep," commented Fred. "We don't get anything for them at the sale. My wife makes the butter and bread and looks after the hens. I attend to the bees and we grow all our fruit and vegetables. We cure our own bacon, ham and pickled pork so you see we get our meals by hard work and not so much money. I will give you something for your hands after tea but they will soon harden up. The first week I was on the farm, my brother and I had to start cleaning out  drains, and our hands were so blistered we could hardly lift a knife before the job was done."
"How long have  you been  here?" said Jim, interested in spite of his weariness.
Fred looked at his wife.
"Twenty one years ," she answered. "The farm has altered a lot in that time, too. When we came, the flats were a tangle of manuka and cutty grass. The roots of the rushes had made mats two or three feet across, "and some of them seemed to be floating islands."
"But if you trod on them,  they often tilted and you landed in feet of muddy water." laughed Fred. "When we got rid of the manuka and swamp vegetation, the big logs came up. This was once a magnificent kauri forest, but we didn't appreciate the size of the trees when we had to dig them out. We have almost removed a second layer of forest trees now, and here are only about ten acres of the wettest part of the farm where the rushes are troublesome."
"The whole district has altered." said Mrs. Williamson thoughtfuly. "You know, on George Pritchard' s survey map of 1869, the Komakorau Sream was navigatable by the paddle steamers that plied on the Waikato River up to Gower's landing, just a mile or so from the Woodland's homestead.  Now it's just a dirty drain."
"Who was George Pritchard?" asked one of the children.
"Well," replied her mother, "you know that in 1864 the soldiers of the fourth Waikato regiment came to Hamilton to fight in what they called he Maori  Wars. They were given fifty acres of farm land as they had been promised when they joined up. George Pritchard was given the farm oppposite the cemetery. I don't think he stayed long; maybe he was away surveying and his wife didn't like to live in such a lonely place by herself, but you can see that soldiers did come to live on the two farms his side of the pa."
"How can you tell?" asked her daughter.
"Before Francis Hicks showed the Waikato farmers how to make wire fences in 1875, they had to make 'live fences'. They dug a ditch round the field and then pushed hawthorne cuttings into the bank. The hawthorns have grown a lot now, of course, but as you go past you can see the neat little fields surrounded by hedges."
"I've noticed those farms," commented Jim. "l thought they looked like a touch of old England. I didn't realize I was looking at a piece of New Zealand history."
Esther laughed. "The official boundary between those farms is in the middle of the ditch, not  the fenceline as it is on places that have been more recently surveyed."
"I think we are altering our attitude to a lot of things as the country gets more settled," commented Fred thoughtfully. "At our meeting of the Brainage Board in April 1934 we wrote to three farmers telling them not to put the washings from the cowshed into the drain, but I remember that in1923 we paid three quarters of the cost of putting a pipe line from Foresman's shed to the drain. We don't like farmers putting their dead cows in the drain now either. Mind you, I have a lot of sympathy for the men who do. In the winter time you can't dig a hole deep enough to bury a cow because you reach the water level too quickly. Anyway, it is very hard work, and the eels soon dispose of an animal in the Lake Drain. Mostly we cook any dead animals for the pigs, but it's a nasty job cutting them up."
"It's a dangerous job; too, if you don't take care not to cut yourself," said his wife. "Mr. McGregor just gave himself a tiny nick when he was skinning a dead sheep, and he was dead, too, in less than a week."
"In spite of all the criticism, this government is doing all it can to help the country," Fred told the other men. "At the end of 1932 they decided that a very extensive drainage scheme in this part of the Waikato would qualify for the Unemployment Scheme under the Public Works Department. There are 700 farms in the area, and by ourselves we could not even consider such a scheme, but this government certainly has some good ideas to increase production. I think Mr. Coates is the better man though Mr. Forbes is the Prime Minister. According to the estimate we received at the Drainage Board in September. 1934, the P.W.D. will pay 80,000 Pounds and we pay 10,000 Pounds, but it will make a tremendous difference to the productivity of the district."
"It will need to." commented Jim laconically, "to spend 90,000 Pounds for 700 farms when you are only getting 9 pence a lb. for your butterfat seems to indicate a lot of faith in the future of your country."
"Perhaps it is justified." said Bill as he was passed a bunch of grapes after the dessert. "Grapes like these would be considered a luxury in most parts of the world."
"Yes, the Waikato really is fertile," answered Fred. "I can go out into the orchard on practically any day in the year and pick fresh fruit. It takes a bit of effort to grow, but it is worth while."
"Are those orange trees by the glass house?" asked Jim. "I saw oranges growing in Spain one holiday."
"One's a small sweet orange, but the other is a grapefruit; Morrinson's seedless, a type developed in New Zealand." replied the farmer.
"Do you remember the first time we tasted grapefruit?" chimed in Mary. "It was when I went up to see Aunty lrJinnie at Huapai."
In the years after the Great War, the orphanages seemed full of lonely children and the church people were asked to take young girls into "service", so Winnie had come from the Presbyterian Orphanage in Auckland. In a district like Gordonton where there was a shortage of girls, she was soon popular, and when she was about twenty, married John Attwood who worked at Woodlands. Then Mattie came to Okoropong, but by the time she married, the reduced price received for butterfat was also reducing the ability to help others, and no more young orphan girls came to work in the house.
Winnie and John Attwood moved to a farm near Auckland and one of the first guests she wanted to visit her was Mary and her mother. It was then the Williamson family tasted the delicious New Zealand grapefruit, and found a grower who was prepared to rai1 a case or two down to Hamilton.
"I am going to try to grow those." Fred declared, though everyone said citrus would not grow in the Waikato. He ordered a grapefruit, an orange and a lemon from Aucklund, planting the little treees carefully, sheltering them during the winter and giving them water during the Autumn. The lemon died but the other two thrived and soon there was no need to send to Auckland. Rather, cases of grapefruit went on the train to the Wellington relations, as plums, peaches and apples had done for many years.

Feeding Out

References:
Rushes ‘an Raupo, To cows an’ Clover by Edith Williamson