James Cowan reports from the West Coast: ''I doubt whether on the whole desolate range of the wild, wet West Coast there is another old digging town that carries such a lost-and-forsaken dead-and-forgotten aspect and atmosphere as Okarito does.''
''Okarito, rain-soaked, weather-aged beyond description, dilapidated as an ancient hat which has had its ruin completed by the wheels of a tramcar, lies straggle-wise on the sandy brink of a salt lagoon, with the big rollers of the Tasman Sea pounding at its front door, nearly a hundred miles south of Hokitika. The shingled roofs of its more venerable buildings should carry a fair-sized crop of hay each season; at any rate that is the impression a survey of the grass-sprouting housetops used to give me.
''Everywhere there are the grass-grown remains of more ancient buildings still, the bush stores and liquor saloons, and dance halls of the roaring old days of the Golden Sixties. For Okarito was a lively shop back in 1865 and 1866, when well-nigh ten thousand diggers combed the heavy auriferous sands of the Five-mile and the Three-mile and the beaches in front of the township for their yellow wealth, and when hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of alluvial gold were won from the seashore hereabouts. Diggers from all quarters of the globe toiled and fought and danced and drank and spent at Okarito. At one period the Okarito beaches were the richest fields on the West Coast. Enormous quantities of gold were saved by the uncomplicated process of washing the sand out over plush, or some similar material, which readily caught the Yellow God.
''Money was earned quickly along those black sand beaches, and it went more quickly still in the public houses, which never closed their doors all night long, and in the dance casinos, where the dozens of smart girls from Melbourne made glad the heart of the gallant digger-men, and where the last figure in every dance was: 'Ladies to the bar!' Tin billy-fulls of gold dust were as plentiful those times as billies of tea. But few of the diggers kept the piles they made. The few calculating, level-headed ones, the storekeeper and the ''pub'' keeper, were the men who made fortunes out of Okarito.''
• At the meeting of the Maori Hill Borough Council, last night, Cr Beeby referred to the cramped condition of some of the residences in the borough, and asked whether the council had any power to prevent the erection of houses on very small sections. Houses had been built, and others were being erected at the present time, on small pieces of land, and certain areas would in the course of time become overcrowded. The Town Clerk stated that there was no by-law dealing with the matter, which was controlled by the Municipal Corporations Act.
He did not think the council had any power beyond that, and to frame a by-law beyond the provisions of the Act would be ultra vires. The Act provided that no house should be erected on any section with an area of less than 300 square feet, and not less than 15 feet across at any point. Cr Beeby said he understood that the Petone Borough Council had a by-law dealing with the matter, and he intended to obtain a copy of it with a view to the framing of a similar by-law for the Maori Hill Borough.
• A consignment of pohutukawa trees has been received by the Marlborough office of the Lands and Survey Department, from the Forestry Branch, and the trees have been planted out in the sounds district. The pohutukawa is commonly known as the Christmas tree. - ODT, 12.9.1913
