Problem of the Month

The William Pettie Bridge, decayed to the stage where it had to be closed to the passage of stock, posed a thorny problem last month for Gisborne's City Council, which had to decide how else the stock could be moved through the city. Drovers said there were plenty more bridges, but the Council said no, put the stock in trucks. "A body-blow to Gisborne's economy" was how the Freezing Works management saw the ban.

It looked as though one more of Gisborne's "frontier-town" peculiarities--the driving of cattle and sheep through the city streets--was in the process of disappearing, so we hurried out early one morning to take this rare picture of a flock of sheep in the main street about to make a historic crossing of the Gladstone Road bridge in defiance of the ban.

(More pictures elsewhere in this issue, including a bull's-eye view of what could have happened had the William Pettie Bridge not been closed).

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