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National Geographic : 1936 Feb
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THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE Photograph by W. Robert Moore A BRIDGE OF REMEMBRANCE HONORS THE ANZACS This war memorial is one of 26 bridges that span the River Avon in its looping course through the city of Christchurch. The sloping banks are popular during the noon lunch hour and its waters are thronged with boats on holidays (see Color Plate XII and text, page 190). population. Approximately 94 per cent are of British ancestry. While the country is in many ways con servative, the New Zealand Government before the turn of the present century at tacked the problem of social legislation. Parliamentary leaders have passed laws that have practically guaranteed "a living wage," provided unemployment insurance, and granted old-age pensions to persons over 65 years of age. The Dominion, therefore, boasts that it is a land free from poverty or extreme wealth, and that its cities have no slums. The railways have been built and oper- That same year, ated almost exclusively by the State. Against the State's 3,315 miles of railways, private companies manage less than 170 miles. By the time we had returned to Auckland our car had rolled up a total of nearly 3,500 miles. To the north still lay much of in terest. A REGION OF HISTORY AND WHALING A little over 150 miles up the eastern coast is the Bay of Is lands. At Russell (once Kororareka), Waitangi, Kerikeri, Paihia, and other spots around the inner sweep of the bay, early New Zealand his tory was made. Here whaling vessels once cluttered the waters; here on Christmas Day, 1814, the first mission ary, Samuel Marsden, preached his first ser mon; here are the old est buildings in the Do minion; and in this soil plows turned the first furrows for agriculture. On the shores of this "Bay of Bays," as well, British sovereignty was proclaimed by the first Governor, Captain Hobson, in 1840. in front of the little build- ing that served as the first Residency, was signed the famous Treaty of Waitangi with the Maoris, which preserved to them the "full, exclusive and undisputable posses sion of their lands and estates" so long as they wished to keep them. No other spot in New Zealand is quite so replete with historic associations as this blue reach of water and strip of verdant shoreland. Across the peninsula, the kauri trees lift their mighty boles skyward (see illustra tion, page 166). Southward from Hokianga Harbor, where ships once carried on 216
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