New Zealand's
Burning
Burning
The Settlers' World
in the Mid 1880s
in the Mid 1880s
ISBN 0 86473 2635
First published
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Contents
Illustrations
Maps and Diagrams
Tables
Preface
The settler New Zealand that flared into flames over
The common people who were flushed out of anonymity by that summer's fires were the first generation to relate to many institutions and arrangements that went to make up the enduring agenda of generations to
come; county councils and education boards, government railways and country quotas, hospital boards and school committees, main trunks and a national civil police force. Many of the creations of the 1875–85 decade were
starting on a century of slow evolution, not to be faced with major restructuring or disbandment until the closing years of the following century. Our
aim is to see how they were making their way in their pristine years, and to
get some understanding of the minds of those who first shaped and used
them. We have deliberately endeavoured to see the settlers on their own
terms and not to look at them from the false perspective of some other
society's agenda. Because their most basic preoccupation was the shaping of
a new agrarian countryside we have deliberately put country before town.
Because our concern is with the new world they were shaping we have concentrated on how they related to and served each other, with less regard for
what they were offering to the outside world. Beef for the
We have placed our settlers for the most part where their everyday life
was lived, between the shoreline and the bush line rather than between
Like the Christian athlete, my race as an historian has been run before a cloud of witnesses who themselves know something of the sweat and dust of the stadium.
My most basic debt is to the settlers themselves. The older generation of
my childhood and youth had earlier been the settler children and younger
adults of the 1880s. They fascinated me by their quirks and their
idiosyncracies, their loyalties and their principles, their pettiness and their
courtesy, their fortitude and their patriotism. Growing up on the bush fringe
of inland Nelson, in a home sans running water, electricity, telephone, wireless, &c, my early life experience had much in common with theirs. Yet I
was conscious of the many ways in which they had marched, and were marching, to the beat of a different drum. They stirred deep questions in my mind,
which my educators did very little to answer.
An historian, above all others, should be aware of the many-layered depths
of his indebtednesses. At
This book has numerous more specific debts. My wife, Betty, has shared
the labour of combing the sources, has tested the clarity and credibility of
successive drafts, and has been a steadfast source of encouragement. Librarians and archivists throughout the country, but especially at the Alexander
Turnbull Library, have been unfailingly patient and helpful. I have had valuable discussions with
Part One
Fire Storm Summer
Fire Storm Summer
Moments of Crisis And Decision
In the mid afternoon of 1 By this time it was moving north to threaten neighbouring
Midhirst.
Among those caught by the initial rush of fire down the forest slopes
towards Stratford were Laurence and Janet Woodruffe and their seven-week-old baby son Edmund. Laurence, a 31-year-old immigrant from Essex, had
taken land on Pembroke Road, made a clearing and put up a house. On 31
Fierce flames sweep across the forest
Meanwhile Janet, waiting with her infant in a misery of apprehension,
peered through the smoke of a conflagration in which it seemed impossible
that Laurence could survive. When the flames at last subsided Laurence
scrambled out of the well. At its mouth he found that his faithful mare,
having refused to leave him, had lain down beside his place of refuge and
been roasted to death. He returned to the creek bed where Janet was overjoyed to see him. Like many of their neighbours, they were left with only
what they stood up in. Their home, all its contents, their small dairy and
other outhouses, their weaner pig and its sty, even their little crop of grass,
had all been consumed.2
The Woodruffes' story of the terror of fire was one of many in a summer
of countrywide drought unprecedented in the experience of the settlers.
Just two days later, on A four-horse coach
3
Over the summer of 1885–86 the worst fires with the greatest dangers
were in the bush districts. But there were many fires outside the bush, including peat fires in the 4
Early in the afternoon of 5
On the morning of 6
We shall find many similar incidents as we unfold the story of this summer of fires. But fires out of control were not special to the summer of
The 1885–86 fires make a dramatic story which is well worth telling for
itself, and this will be part of our concern in Part One ‘Fire Storm Summer’.
But throughout, and especially in Part Two ‘Anatomy of a Settler Society’,
we will be using the fires to uncover the nature and dynamics of this settler
world, especially the new rural world which it was creating. Social historians
are well aware of the difficulty of uncovering the life of the common people.
In the ephemeral, rapidly changing world of the settlement frontiers it becomes especially difficult. Our pioneer bush settlers are a particularly difficult group to get to grips with. In 7 Other writers have commented on the ‘anonymous’ character of bush settlements, on a notable lack of records left by the
settlers, and on the difficulties of giving an adequate account of the 19th
century virgin forest sawmilling industry.8 Our aim is to use this summer of
fires to make progress in filling such gaps in our historical understanding.
As this chapter's examples illustrate, the fires served to strip away the
hidden, anonymous character of frontier life, and expose it to the world.
For a few weeks public attention focused on the widespread struggle to protect home, life and living that was proceeding in the hinterlands. The press,
that prolific and ubiquitous reporter and commentator on colonial life, briefly
turned from its more common urban bias to record and explain the rural
crises suddenly thrust into its attention. The great masses of smoke darkening the day over large parts of the country, and the lurid flickerings on many
a distant skyline each night, could not be ignored. As trainloads of urban
fire brigadesmen and volunteers were thrown into the battles up the line,
and carriagefuls of scorched, destitute, bleary-eyed refugees were unloaded
to the care of local townsmen, the presses and telegraph lines quickly enlisted the colony's concern. Refugees were interviewed and the relief trains
carried reporters to get first-hand news from the front. The towns rallied to
raise relief funds, and local and regional leaders grappled with the problems
The summer of 1885–86 is also a useful point at which to tackle another
blind spot in our settlement story. We have comparatively good studies of
the founding years of the main settlements in the 18405 and 18505, of the
gold rushes of the 18605 and of the Vogel immigration drive of the 1870s.
The 18905 and the early 20th century have also attracted considerable attention, so that the Liberal government's reforms, the rise of trade unionism,
and the growth of the refrigerated export industries are fairly well understood. For rural life, the rise of the sheep stations and the wool trade was
well documented at the time, and has received copious attention since. What
we do not have is adequate treatment of the rise of the yeoman farmer in the
later decades of the 19th century, and particularly we have little account of
what he was thinking and doing in the years before it became obvious that
his long term fortunes would be built around the new refrigerated exports.
By looking closely at the 1885–86 summer, we shall gain much understanding of the creation of the landscape, the rural society, and the economic
infrastructure that undergirded the rise of the dairy and meat industries,
and from the 18905 began sending strong echelons of farmer politicians to
give a unique flavour to our national politics.9
The 18805 also saw the maturing of the political and administrative structures which from the mid 18705 replaced the Provincial System. The fires
tested the comparatively new local bodies and the local branches of the fledgling central government departments, and we shall be able to see how they
responded to the challenge. The fires also raise questions about the essential
nature of the new society which was emerging from the colonising process.
Our introductory examples have an enigmatic flavour when related back to
our images of Old World traditions. There is something primeval about the
Woodruffe story-the well and the windlass, and the faithful horse dying
beside her master's refuge. George Newman and his coach team, braving
highway dangers to get the mail through, have a late 18th or early 19th century flavour, as also does the forthright activist vicar of sui generis?. Part One will suggest many such questions for
consideration in Part Two.
The Setting of the Pyre
In 1 By mid 2 almost all the 3 and on 11 January the mail coach dispensed with the ferry
punt at the west end of the Manawatu gorge, and the water did not even
reach the axles.4 Nor was New Zealand suffering alone. Reports in December told of an alarming drought in Malvina collected a quarter of an inch of
ash on her decks, and lit her pinnacle lamps in broad daylight to enable her
helmsman to see the compass. In 5
Throughout New Zealand there was widespread apprehension as the
long drought deepened and the countryside scorched tinder dry under the
unrelenting summer sun. The settlers had a fund of experience of fire both
as a tool and as a foe. From the late 1840s pastoralists, abandoning Wakefield's
vision of an English style of countryside, had used fire widely on the grasslands
as they rapidly built up flocks of sheep managed in the Australian squatter
tradition. On much of the primitive landscape they found that the dominant species were tussock grasses—coarse, wiry bunch-grasses which were
particularly flammable in dry periods because of their habit of shedding
fibrous litter which remained raw rather than decaying to form humus. The
tussock was often associated with rank growth of matagouri and speargrass.
Damper districts were covered, not with tussock, but with bracken and
manuka scrub. Whatever the cover, the going was often difficult for both
man and beast, and the first settlers resorted ‘to the simple device of burning
their way into and through the country’.6 Learning that after such a burn a
succulent green herbage appeared, the pastoralists made seasonal burning
A hot corner in a grassland fire
Studholme versus the Queen was approaching resolution in
‘The matter is, as it were, sub judice,’ says Mr Back, ‘we admit nothing.’ That
somewhat disconcerting statement may be taken to signify: ‘Yes, it is possible
that sparks from a locomotive may set fire to grass and crops; but, look you,
there are smokers; and careless smokers who ride by rail and ride by road, and
throw their matches about. There are swaggers, there are traction engines,
and portable engines for threshing machines and they have fire-boxes and
throw ashes about too. Finally there are accidents outside the railway department—there are even, they tell me, cases where vagabonds and derelict glass
bottles have been set down as the cause of serious fire.7
Studholme was awarded £400 145 3d damages with costs.8 The Lyttelton Times
carried plenty of reports of grass fires arising from various causes, known
and unknown, over these summer months.
The worst of this summer's fires, however, were not in the grasslands, but
in the more recent bush settlements. For the origins of the great mass of
Over these long months of despair and desperation the colony's leaders
did some hard thinking about the dilemmas that faced them. If these Maori
guerrilla attacks were to become a persistent feature of
On
The colonists got their miracles, and the plan was substantially implemented. The Fox cabinet was in itself something of a political miracle in the
striking adequacy of its experience and talents to the task. The combined
skills of such men as Fox, McLean, Vogel,
It was years of labour by these bush settlers which created the mass of debris which fuelled the greatest fires of 1885–86. We will therefore give an account of how the assault on the forest was carried through. Once access to the forests had been opened up by good roads and railways, and land settlement legislation appropriate to the bush put in place, the prejudice against bush land melted away. It even came to be considered a better proposition than open country for the man of limited means. It was cheaper, at perhaps a quarter to half the price of open country of a similar quality. One needed only an axe, a bill-hook and some grass seed to raise one's initial crop. The forest itself provided the materials for a home and much of its furnishings, and for farm buildings and fences. In contrast, the open country settler needed draught animals, plough and harrows to raise his first crop, and materials for his home, sheds and fences had usually to be purchased. He often had also to buy fuel; the bush settler had an embarrassing abundance. While bush felling created a strong winter demand for labour in forest districts, the struggling open country farmer had a long slack period each winter. Most bush settlers drew a steady supply of free meat from the surrounding virgin forest—wild cattle, wild pigs, native pigeons, and even imported game such as pheasants. Few open country farmers were so liberally supplied.
Bush clearing began with underscrubbing, the cutting of all undergrowth and creepers with bill-hooks and light axes, work with which women and children often helped. Properly done this formed the tinder for the burn; badly done, small growth and creepers flourished in the fallen timber, resisting rather than helping the burn. Next the standing bush was felled and left to dry. Underscrubbing and felling were done during winter and spring, stopping in time to allow the last timber felled to dry before the burn. Then, on a suitable day in late summer or early autumn, came the burn. When the fire had passed cocksfoot and clover seed were broadcast among the stumps and logs. Over the following years ‘stumping’ and ‘logging up’ steadily cleared the remaining debris.
(Above) Primeval bush; (Below) Forest giants after the fire
Within this general pattern there were regional and individual variations. There were differences of opinion over the felling of all the heavy
timber. Some thought it false economy to leave anything standing, others
left large trees to stand for a few years. In the high rainfall districts quite a
good case could be made for the latter practice. If felled these large trees
often became waterlogged and difficult to dispose of, whereas standing they
dried out so that they burned easily. Central and North Taranaki had large
numbers of huge, hard-wooded rata trees which were usually left in this way
as great dead sentinels brooding over the bleak bush burn landscapes. There
were differences in the starting time for felling. In drier districts felling could
begin in March. In Taranaki it was delayed till about July because here mahoe
was a common tree and it had a strong tendency to put out second growth
in the heavy Taranaki rainfall.9
By the late 1870s contract bush felling gangs were becoming common,
and skills and techniques were improving rapidly. A skilled bushman felled
trees to lie evenly over the land, with no bare patches for the Scotch thistles'
succulent growth to hamper the spread of the burn. He knew exactly where
a tree would fall, and sped up his work with good ‘drives’—rows of partly
cut trees brought down by cutting right through the last in the row. Where
a trunk was large or badly twisted near the base, bushmen became adept at
cutting further up, working from a stage of pieces of wood and ponga. In
the later 1880s the stage gave way to the jigger-board, which fixed into a
notch in the trunk.10
The timing of the burn was a fiercely debated issue. February was the
most favoured month, but fearing a wet February many a settler was tempted
by a dry spell in January. But January was grass-seed harvest, and a burn
often put one's neighbour's crop at risk. A neighbour's felled bush might
also be fired, and when a poor January burn was followed by a hot dry
February, feelings could run high. The burn was lit once the dew had lifted
on a day with a steady breeze in the right direction. One aimed for a good
wide even face of fire across the section. A good burn was a dramatic occasion, with great flames leaping upward into dense masses of smoke, the
roaring and crackling punctuated by the occasional crash of a falling branch
or standing tree. But with an unexpected wind change everything could
quickly go desperately wrong.11
The success of the 1870s colonial development strategy led to a massive
shift in the timber industry.12 Earlier it had been water-based, feeding a coastal
timber trade. Its main centres had been
The success of both bush settlement and the new railways depended
heavily on the growth of forest industries. Thus 33,658 tons of timber and
12,420 tons of firewood made up nearly 58 per cent of the goods traffic on
the Hawke's Bay line in the year to
The spread of population in the
Under J.D. Ormond's experienced leadership the Hawke's Bay portion
of the east-west military highway was pushed forward with equal vigour. In
While the majority of the Seventy Mile Bush pioneers were Scandinavians,
it was not long before settlers of British origin outnumbered them. In On the road through the Seventy Mile Bush
In the later 1870s and early 1880s the Seventy Mile Bush settlers fared less
well than those west of the ranges. The Rangitikei-Manawatu railway had
quickly tapped the forest, but the Hawke's Bay railway had 60 miles to
cover before it reached the bush. Just as it neared the better timber stands,
construction slackened with the coming of depression. These hard times
and the longer, more costly haul to the port, led to a much slower development of milling. Much of the timber industry remained centred in
An interesting account of these Seventy Mile Bush settlements in the
autumn of 13
If the strategic thinking of the
Taranaki was slow to take advantage of the 1870s development programme. The small, isolated
Nevertheless the Mountain Road proved no easy proposition. With
Taranaki's high rainfall it deteriorated each winter into an impassible quagmire. Still, to the south the fertile open country of the Patea coast was again
filling up with settlers, who used the Mountain Road as a summer stock
route, to get their fat cattle to Waitara for shipment to the
The first of these new settlements were Midhirst and Stratford, which
were to see some of the most dramatic fires of 1885–86. With the passing of
the provincial system a new Land Act came into force in
Midhirst had a different story. It was a special settlement sponsored by
In
Early in
In the early 1880s new settlers flowed steadily into the Mountain Road
townships and bush sections. With the completion of the railway sawmilling
Let us look a little more closely at the Stratford settlement as it approached
the summer of 1885–86. The township, with its two-storey hotel, its three
stores, railway station, school, and recently completed town hall, was very
like many another small centre throughout the country. A Hawera Star reporter describing a horse ride round Mount 14 Yet it was a little unusual in some ways. At over 300 metres
above sea level it was, together with its neighbours Midhirst and Waipuku,
the most elevated of the new bush settlements. And it was certainly a little
peculiar that starting from this height, much of the first thrust of settlement
had been up the slopes of Mount Egmont Star
might almost have been prophesying the happenings of the following January:
When the timber has been down four or five years, it gets very inflammable
in a dry summer, the merest spark being enough to set logs and stumps
going. If a good breeze springs up when the timber is in that state, the fire
rapidly spreads all over the clearings, and will often burn most of the grass. It
is a bad look-out then for shingle roofs and punga whares, for the smoke is so
thick that one cannot see the fire at all. Post and rail fences generally get
swept away, and individuals suffer severely.15
Finally we must note that it was not only the tussock, grass and scrub of the
sheep runs and the forest litter of the bush clearings that were being baked
into tinder by this summer's drought. The colony's towns and cities too
were being scorched into highly combustible pyres. The
Hawke's Bay and the Seventy Mile Bush
The summer's fires in the Seventy Mile Bush make an untidy story, partly
because the bush settlements were an untidy collection, in various stages of
development. In the northern section of the bush, townships had been
multiplied by the divergence of road and railway, for when the railway route
was finalised it entered the Bush near Takapau and proceeded south some
six kilometres east of the pioneer township of Norsewood. Takapau gained
in importance, as the point where railway and road diverged, and
Ormondville and Makotuku grew as rivals to Norsewood, benefiting from
their position on the railway. Yet for years all their wheeled road traffic went
by way of Norsewood, though those on foot and horse often used the railway as a short cut.1 Kopua and Matamau also each flourished briefly as
sawmilling centres. All these settlements looked on the little town of Waipawa
to the north-east as their local capital. So too, by a separate network of roads
and tracks leading eastwards from the foothills of the Ruahines, did the
settlers of Ashley Clinton, Makaretu and Blackburn. This area was noted
for fine totara stands, but lacked good communications to get its timber
products out. Far from the railway, it was inadequately roaded through being settled under a Hawke's Bay Act which did not allocate any of the land
payments to local bodies for roadworks. The various settlements therefore
differed both in the development of their farming and forest industries, and
in their ease of communication with each other and with Waipawa and the
outside world.
If the settlements make an untidy story, so do the fires. Rather than falling upon the district in one clear swoop, they seemed to play a cat and mouse game with the settlers, stirring this way and that with the eddying breezes, ebbing and flowing as the occasional showers broke the long succession of scorching days, wearing the settlers down by insidiously stalking them week after week, then suddenly pouncing as if hoping to catch them off their guard. The settlers first came under real pressure in mid December and were not clearly out of trouble until the end of January.
At Makaretu bush burns began in mid November and a local correspondent
Figure 3.1 Southern Hawke's Bay, summer 1885–86
2 In the Seventy Mile Bush itself a fire which had
smouldered for two months near Makotuku, following the burning of a
sawmill, flared into a threatening bush fire early in December, but the danger passed as the wind dropped and showers fell.3 By mid December a tremendous fire had somehow got away in the ranges behind Makaretu and at
times was blanketing Waipawa with smoke.4 After these and doubtless other
unreported alarms, the fires made their first real pounce at Takapau on Monday 21 December.5
The Takapau fire was attributed to settlers firing bush burns without calculating the consequences. A rising south-west wind blowing towards Frederick Drower's sawmill carried the flames through dry timber and tree tops to the mill. The danger was not realised till noon, and the battle was over by 3 p.m. The men fought vigorously and might have saved the mill had they not been blinded by the dense smoke. As it was, they managed to get much of the machinery and equipment to a place of safety before the flames swept through the mill building. They also saved the miles of tramway serving the mill. Several workmen's houses were burnt down, including those of two family men, Joseph Sullivan, bushman, and Tripp, a shoemaker, who lost his tools of trade. These families, with five children between them, lost almost everything, including clothing and bedding. One of the women had been confined to bed and was carried to safety in Thomas Hobson's woolshed, where both families took refuge. A bullock team hauling a load of timber from the mill took fright as the flames approached and broke loose. By the time the driver had rounded them up his dray and its load had gone up in flames.
This fire had by no means finished its work. On Tuesday the 22nd it was
spreading in nearby bush and Takapau was almost deserted as its folk went
to aid their bush settler neighbours. On Wednesday the 23rd it began breaking into the open country, spreading in grass along the railway, along gorse
hedges, and over dry pasture. The biggest losers were the Whites of Sherwood, towards Ashley Clinton. Mrs White had been widowed only the previous year. As the fire approached she sent her two sons to drive in the cattle
while she and a companion tried to save the furniture. They rescued a piano, but the homestead, the rest of the furniture, and the outbuildings,
went up in flames. The start of a bush burn
Over the night of Sunday 27 December the fire still smouldering at the
site of Lewis Parsons's old mill, about a kilometre from Makotuku, was stirred
to life by a strong breeze. At daybreak on Monday it broke suddenly upon
Makotuku from the west. Those in its path had little time to defend their
homes and their attempts were hampered by dense acrid smoke preceding
the flames. Some managed to get their goods to the railway station and into
railway trucks. One settler, Forward, got all his furniture into the garden in
the hope of saving it, only to see it go up in flames while the house survived.
Before the day was out the destruction included Walter Gundrie's planing
mill, Mosen and Schmitt's sawmill, about six houses, and several stables and
other outbuildings. Sparks, and burning shavings from the planing mill were
carried by the strong wind to spread the fire. The settlers' exertions prevented the fire from getting a hold to the east of the railway line and saved
the school, although it caught fire several times. The fires continued to spread
and test the ability of the settlers to hold what they had saved. Gundrie's
The Daily Telegraph printed a first-hand account of one family's
experiences of the following night, from a Taradale resident unfortunate
enough to have begun on the previous Saturday a visit to the home of his
brother-in-law in the bush between Parsons's mill and Makotuku. All day
Monday they watched the fire spreading from the west, but from the direction of the wind they were in no danger. The three adults and five children
(one just back from twelve months in Taradale) settled down for the night—
no doubt with careful arrangements for a watch to be kept. During the
night a wind change brought the fire upon them. With only time to grab a
minimum of clothing and a few blankets they fled from the cottage, which
was completely destroyed. They found shelter in a whare belonging to Lewis
Parsons. The wife and children spent a miserable night there while the two
men joined the battle to save Parsons's mill. Next morning the visitor decided
to make his escape from the bush. Finding it impossible to get through the
fire to the Makotuku station, he made his way to Ormondville where he
caught the afternoon train north.
By Tuesday 29 December
The press reported the contingent marshalled at the station to number
in fact about 60, ranging from mere youths to grey-haired men. Their dress
was miscellaneous, with fire brigade members in their oldest uniforms, judging rags most appropriate for the task ahead. Superintendent Waterworth
was in charge, with several Volunteer officers to assist him. Although a telegraphed enquiry to Makotuku had advised (it proved wrongly) that no
water was available for fire engines, it was decided to ignore this advice. The
party's truck load of equipment and supplies included a small manual engine with 600 feet of hose, canvas buckets, two cases of axes, a bundle of
Meeting the afternoon train down from Tahoraiti at Pakipaki, they
stormed its passengers with questions about Makotuku's fate. ‘Great blaze
there, not so bad as in the morning; fourteen houses gone; no water to be
got’, they were told, and ‘you had better take your fill of fresh air while you
have the chance’.6 Their journey onward enlivened by quick-steps played on
a piccolo by an elderly Volunteer, the party anxiously studied the country
ahead. The Te Aute valley was full of smoke, apparently from local fires. The
position of the railway was marked by a jagged carbon streak across the face
of the country, the result of precautionary burning of the grass within the
railway fences. At Te Aute there was a halt for tea and sandwiches. Leaving
Te Aute the dense mass of smoke above the bush came into view, the sun
lighting it up in rich ruby reds, golds and yellows, as if it were a sunset.
Waipawa had a pile of bread, cheese and beer barrels ready to be bundled on
board for the relief party, Makotuku having telegraphed that it could not
provision them. Evening was coming on as they entered the bush at Takapau
and began seeing evidence of fire, sometimes as bright red points through
the trees, sometimes flaring up right beside the line. Stretches of dark bush,
dismal in the gloaming, alternated with clearings covered with burning logs
and dead standing trees discharging fountain sprays of sparks with each puff
of wind. In places whole hillsides, exposed to the light wind, were burning
hotly. Here and there a small cottage stood out blackly against a dull red
background of fire-lit smoke, with candlelight showing that the occupants
were standing their ground. Carefully examining each bridge before crossing, the expedition moved on through Ormondville, which had a great show
of fire all round, and at last reached Makotuku at 8.45 p.m.
The relief party piled out and questioned the small crowd that greeted
them. The locals were in a resigned mood as the wind had dropped and the
worst seemed over. Yet they knew that the wind was likely to freshen towards daybreak, bringing a real danger of losing the rest of the township.
On one thing they were unanimous: there was no water for the fire engine.
Fortunately the newcomers assessed the situation for themselves. They found
that most of the burning bush covered an area of about six square miles to
the west of the township, between it and Norsewood. Within this conflagration was Parsons's beleaguered mill, cut off from relief by the flames. But
something could be done for Makotuku. A triangular clump of about 12
acres of bush lay between the railway line and the main road, which separated it from the burning bush. Here and there the flames had leapt the road
into this clump. Should a breeze whip the whole clump into flames, the rest
On Wednesday morning, 30 December, the relief party freshened themselves as best they could with the primitive arrangements of a few buckets
and a couple of towels. There was little left to do so they set off, with their
fire engine, on the morning train for
At Norsewood a log pile behind a vacant hotel was threatened by the
flames. If it caught the hotel must go and take with it several adjoining
buildings. Among those busy shifting these logs was Silberman, owner of a
mill about half a mile away towards Ormondville. He assured his fellow
workers that his mill was safe as there was plenty of water about it. Finishing
the job with the logs he went off to see how things were at his mill. He was
soon back with a bundle of blankets under his arm—all he had been able to
save from his mill and his house. Another settler's house near the mill was
also swept away. Meanwhile the long defence of Parsons's mill, further back
in the bush, was still proving successful. But up in the foothills the Makaretu
settlers were taking losses, though only scattered details of their battle reached
the press. On the morning of 30 December the Hawke's Bay Herald's
Makotuku correspondent rode out to Makaretu to see how the district was
faring. He found Guldbrandsen's house burnt down, and two adjacent settlers, Stenberg and Hansen, blinded by the heat and smoke. Before setting
off back home he arranged for a man to sleep in the school and protect it,
and also to assist Stenberg and Hansen until they recovered their sight. Fires
were now beginning to cause damage further south. On New Year's Eve
Findlay's mill at Tahoraite just south of
The rain, it seems, was by no means general. On Sunday, 3 January,
a strong wind swept a tidal wave of fire down on Makaretu. Its work of
The news galvanised
The main fires had been briefly checked by the fall of rain but by Tuesday, 5 January, they were again on the move. Between Makotuku and
Norsewood Parsons's mill was once more under threat. And Walter Gundrie
had suffered another blow. He had known that his sawmill on the Makotuku
to Norsewood road could not be defended if the fire reached the area. There
was a large stretch of tinder dry felled bush to one side of it, and bush quite
close on the other. The mill was in a gully with no place to which the machinery could be moved for safety. On Tuesday afternoon the fire reached it
and quickly wiped out the mill and all the workmen's huts. Before the day
was out the fires were also causing havoc on German Line, named for the
origins of its settlers, a number of whom had arrived in Hawke's Bay on the
Fritz Reuter from
Even those who had not yet lost by the fires were being worn down by
the constant threat. On Wednesday, 6 January, the Hawke's Bay Herald's
Norsewood correspondent described the situation. His place was safer than
that of the family opposite, so they had moved in with him with their six
children and all their bedding. This had happened three times; twice they
had gone back thinking the fire was over. With eleven souls under his care
and fire all round, he was just about to sit up all night for the fourth time in
a week. He described how the wind was bringing the fire back over ground
it had covered earlier; trees and logs which had been only slightly burnt
before had since become so dry that they now burnt fiercely. From his window through the drifting smoke he could see carts loaded with people and
furniture moving about looking for safer places for the night. On this Wednesday afternoon the residents of Ormondville were in a similar predicament.
The fires now seemed to be investing their town, and they feared that if the
wind should rise the place would be completely destroyed before morning.
Almost all of them had their furniture out of their houses, awaiting a train
of trucks being sent to remove it to a place of safety. Several houses did catch
fire, but fortunately the wind changed suddenly and they were saved. The
strain of watching and waiting continued for several more days before the
danger was past.
There were fires in other districts to both the north and the south. At
The fires seem to have died down over mid January, but there was another burst of activity towards the end of the month. Thomas Tanner, pioneer
Hawke's Bay runholder, had a property at Woodville and on 22 January the
manager fired the felled bush on it. Unfortunately the fire leapt the Manawatu
River and got into William Peart's section, burning his whare and blinding
him. He would almost certainly have perished but for the timely intervention of neighbours. The fire spread to several further properties, causing
considerable losses. The last week of the month began with settlements all
down the line through the bush once again in danger. At Ormondville fires
burnt perilously close on both sides, and a day and night watch had again to
be kept. No water was available, and if a strong wind had got up the town
would have been hard to save. Makotuku was once more under threat as was
Tanner and Mortensen's mill at Matamau. On 25 January a strong wind
suddenly brought fire raging down on
At last, at the close of the month, 36 hours of heavy and widespread rain effectively broke the drought. Smouldering stumps, logs and sawdust heaps were finally thoroughly doused and the fire danger had passed. Both settlers and provincial leaders could now turn their whole attention to reconstruction and relief.
Taranaki and the Stratford Fire Storm
As they followed the news of the Hawke's Bay fires, it would have seemed
incredible to the Stratford settlers that they were shortly to experience a
blaze whose fury would outdo all that had gone before. Their district had a
reputation for drenching rain and mud, and even in these days of drought
there was everywhere the sound of rushing water from the rocky, boulder-strewn beds of the upper reaches of the Patea and Waingongoro Rivers and
their tributaries, fed by the melting snows of 1
Figure 4.1 Stratford rural settlers in the fire of 2 Walters, the district's first builder, helped them put
up their first home, of pongas with a tramped earth floor. They furnished it
with the aid of a versatile neighbour, Pilcher Frederick Ralfe. Born in Kent
and educated at King William College on the Isle of Man, his experience
included seven years seafaring and over 30 years farming in 3 He showed the Watkinses how to pitsaw timber and shape it into
furniture. Within a year or two they were a very self-sufficient household,
A short distance away in Cardiff Road, George Albert Marchant (4 On 5
As they rode down by way of Opunake Road, Marchant noted the ripening
acres of grass seed in his neighbours' clearings, and smoke rising from bush
burns in various directions. He was not as sanguine as his neighbours about
the fires, and year by year had warned them about the dangers. He asked his
‘good friend J.’ to keep an eye on his own place for the day. This was probably his next-door neighbour on Cardiff Road, William Johnson. The
Johnsons with their seven children and a nurse had emigrated cabin class in
6 Together
Johnson and Ralfe had journeyed to Patea where, with George Marchant's
help, they obtained their Cardiff sections. The three men remained life-long
friends. Near Stratford the Marchants passed 7 George Marchant and Thomas
Skinner were soon to be closely associated through their involvement in the
aftermath of the day's happenings in Stratford.
In and around Stratford the day's activities unfolded along their accustomed paths.8 Some settlers, like Pitt of Stratford township, were busy fencing. Others were probably logging up their clearings, making good piles of
firewood near their homes in readiness for the cold Stratford winter. On one
George Marchant 1849–1943
Stratford's first store: Curtis Bros
9
Going about his storekeeping tasks that morning, Town Board Chairman Charles Curtis may have been moved to review his refusal of the New
10
At 3.05 p.m. the afternoon train north, whose journey had begun in
11
The fires seem to have coalesced into two main conflagrations, one associated with the clearings along Opunake Road, and the other with those
along Pembroke Road. These united their forces on the western boundary
of Stratford and fell upon the town with appalling rapidity. The wind and
the draught from the blaze were now so strong that a great shower of sparks
and flakes of fire deluged down right across the township clearing and into
the bush on the opposite side. Not only was the place completely enveloped
in flames as stumps, logs, dead trees, crops, fences and buildings flared alight,
Zillah Watkin carried vivid memories of that day right down to her closing years in Evening Post seems to be an almost immediate
report by Edward. If this identification is correct, the most detailed, vivid
and personalised reporting we have of the Stratford rural battles is from
these two neighbouring outlying clearings. Writing to ‘Dear Harry’, Edward
told him
One of our neighbours happened to be in Stratford, and got your wire, or I
should not know you had sent it. I wrote the reply on the back of the
message and sent it, which I hope you got all right. I say that I wrote the
There were sixteen hands, all told, in the house, so you can form an idea
of what would have happened in case the house caught fire, for if such a thing
had happened, the only thing to do would be for me to have collared a child
under each arm, and Alice the same, and, in trying to get away, would either
have been burnt to death in the fire or suffocated in the smoke…. My
neighbour had a mare tied up to his fence, in case he should have to ride
away, but the mare got roasted to death.12
Joseph's reminiscences are understandably deficient about the wider context, but more vivid than Edward's in describing the battle for his own home.
He tells how the two men banked earth around the house to stop the fire
On Cardiff Road no houses were lost, although James Belcher's had a
very narrow escape. But right along the road seed grass, pasture and fencing
were consumed and a number of cattle burnt to death. On Opunake Road
the toughest battle was probably on Joseph Richardson's clearing. When the
fire swept down, the whole family except the ten-year-old son were cut off
from the house. On his own he successfully defended the house, putting
wet blankets on it, pulling down fencing leading to it and taking other precautions. Meanwhile Mrs Richardson protected her own children and some
others with them by putting them into a tunnel hollowed in the creek bank
as a store for meat and butter.13 The fire took the Richardson's pasture, grass
seed crop, garden and orchard. Their neighbour towards Stratford, John
Kirkpatrick, lost his shed and yard, dairy, outhouse, fencing and three cattle. Neighbouring Richardson's to the west was Malone Brothers, the largest
property on the road. They lost no buildings, but a large area in pasture,
crop and orchard was razed.
On Brookes Road, south of the township, two homes and the bridge
contractors' whare were lost. Frank Standing, George Turner and their workman Howell barely escaped being overwhelmed by the flames. Their whare,
swags and all their timber were completely consumed. Howell's borrowed
horse broke away, taking refuge on the railway line, only to be killed there a
little later by the train. The fire swept over T. McMillan's clearing taking his
whare and all its contents and his pasture. He escaped towards the township, passing August Lehmann's where he tried unsuccessfully to persuade
the family to join him in his flight. There was great concern for the Lehmanns
until into the following day. Their house was known to have been razed, but
there was no sign of them. When Standing and Turner went back next morning to inspect the site of their contract, they found tracks leaving the place
for a short distance, and it was hoped that they had found shelter in the
bush. Eventually they were found at Albert Pioch's abandoned home on
Monmouth Road, and the amazing story of their escape became known.
Having lost the battle for their home they scrambled to their potato patch
as their one hope of survival. There they covered themselves with the green
We have already described the ordeal of Laurence and Janet Woodruffe
and baby Edmund on their Pembroke Road clearing. A kilometre away up
the road Janet's father William Harre and her three brothers fought a tremendous battle to save their house and farm buildings. All four received
serious injuries requiring medical treatment and the
Before we turn to experiences of the holocaust in the township itself the
special experiences of a small straggle of settlers along its northern edge need
our attention. Isolated by flames from the rest of the population, they were
driven into the bush east of the town. Believing Stratford completely destroyed, and that the fire was pursuing them through the bush, they fled
down East Road. Furthest in this flight in the late afternoon of 6 January
were Jane Capper and her four children, the eldest aged seven, the youngest
a baby a few months old. Leaving their home in flames and their four cattle
When, a little after 3 p.m., the deluge of fire flakes descended on their great tinder dry clearing, turning it almost instantaneously into an inferno, the residents of Stratford responded in much the same way as their country neighbours. Most, whether from necessity or inclination, stood and fought. A few were hounded by the flames to flight into the surrounding forest. In the business centre the defence of Curtis's store is probably typical. The fire quickly took the uninhabited, and therefore undefended, Town Hall nearby. From there it spread towards the bakehouse and kerosene store at the rear of the shop. If these had caught, the whole would have gone, so all hands rushed to their defence, only to be driven back shortly by the dense, suffocating smoke. Charles Curtis took refuge in his cellar but, feeling suffocated there, fled down to the bed of the Patea River. From here he and the other defenders of the town centre made forays to check their properties, damp down fires creeping towards them by way of logs, stumps and fences, and extinguish sparks before they could gain a hold. Each time they were greeted by the raging wind, the roaring of the fire, the cries of horses and the bellowing of cattle, and were soon driven back by the suffocating effects of smoke and heat and by sheer exhaustion, to prostrate themselves again by the cool rushing waters of the Patea in its sheltered ravine. Somehow, apart from the town hall and a few outbuildings, the town centre came through scorched but intact. Over the rest of the big clearing many settlers were not so fortunate. At his work somewhere in the town, labourer Robert Stanley nearly lost his life, while back at his house his wife only just managed to get her children out, and was unable to recover the family's little nest egg, in the form of a sum of money, four watches and some jewellry. Bootmaker William Northcott was only able to retrieve a mattress and blankets before his house went up in flames. Besides these and those who fled down East Road, the Sharrocks, Boormans, Hunters, Taylors and several single men also lost their homes. The gang of itinerant grass seed harvesters, Bicknell, Petersen and the two Christiansens, lost their swags. The miscellany of other losses included beehives, cowsheds, dairies, pigsties, fowl houses, hay, gardens, crops, as well as horses, cattle, pigs and poultry. To a greater extent than on the rural clearings, families were scattered in Stratford, with men at work, and children away with their friends, and there was much distress when they were unable to find each other in the turmoil.
A little after 6 p.m. the regular evening train from 14
Meanwhile the train was making a slow journey south, hindered by smoke
and the livestock sheltering on the line. It reached
The train carried firemen from the Hawera Star reporter. Fire first came into view near Te Roti and from there
on smoke and flames increased as they proceeded. At Eltham it was found
that Southey and Co's Mangawhero sawmill had been in great danger during the day, but had been saved by a wind change. At Ngaere also the wind
change had brought relief from a very ‘warm’ situation. Lights burning in
every house along the route showed that the settlers were all on guard. Here
and there through the murky darkness great forest trees could be seen aflame.
Stratford was approached warily on account of the numerous cattle and
horses taking refuge on the line, and the need to inspect the track and bridges
for damage. At about 11.30 p.m. the special pulled into Stratford station, to
find about twenty refugees, mainly those brought in by Skinner, sheltering
in the waiting room. Through the dense smoke the newcomers were relieved to make out the outlines of the main buildings in the business centre.
The blaze in the township had now died down, and a drop and shift in the
wind was also giving relief. In the darkness, with the main danger past, there
was little for the relief party to do. The train's engine went out to the Kahouri
bridge just north of the town, and a rumour that it had been burnt was
dispelled. At 12.30 a.m. the special left for
The Star obtained a preliminary account of what had happened from a
volunteer on the special but its reporter stayed behind to build up a clearer
picture and follow developments. After a few hours rest he was up at daybreak. Even then the place was almost completely obscured by smoke. From
his enquiries he built up a picture of the fire descending suddenly on the
township, and blazing furiously for four or five hours.
There was not a log or stump on the square mile clearing that was not
As Thursday, 7 January, unfolded Stratford's weary settlers could not
understand why no help came from Taranaki Herald got a reporter into the township.
Nearly every person he met had a cold water bandage on his eyes or carried
a wet handkerchief in his hands. At Curtis's store he found several men who
15
As the battle for Stratford slowly subsided, the battle for Midhirst got
under way. On the Wednesday evening, while the Stratford crisis was at its
height, James Hirst had a fight on his hands in Radnor Road, Midhirst.
From bush blazing on the other side of the road the wind blew blinding
smoke and a blazing mass of sparks right over his large house, and even with
the help of about twenty of his neighbours, he believed he would have lost it
but for a wind change. The following night Hirst led the defence of the
small house of a Radnor Road neighbour, and this time the battle was lost.
By now local fires and fires advancing from Stratford were combining to
invest Midhirst, and when on the Friday morning the wind freshened and
again changed to the south-east a crisis rapidly developed. Fortunately for
Midhirst,
Meanwhile in 16
A bellman was sent around the town asking all prepared to join the relief
party to be at the town hall at noon. There a party was put together and told
to assemble at the station by 1 p.m. The train left punctually at 1 pm. with a
party of 58 under the leadership of surveyor Thomas Skinner, already a veteran of the fight at Stratford. W. Guerin, Taranaki News reporter with the
party, described the expedition. From Sentry Hill onwards the journey was
through immense volumes of dense stifling smoke. Past Inglewood ashes
were showering the country like a snow storm. It was evident that the wind
had risen. Guerin's description of the smoke is supported by other evidence.
A half day's tramp into the bush to the east of Inglewood Thomas Skinner's
brother, surveyor William Henry Skinner, was getting his gang settled into
work from a new bush camp he had established just after New Year. His
diary entry for this day, 17 He
would have been about twenty kilometres away through the bush from the
fires his brother was leading the relief party towards. Soon the first fires were
seen from the train, and at Tariki Road a party of five was set down to go to
the aid of its bush settlers. With fire running along both sides of the line, the
train edged onwards, the driver peering through the murk to make out the
herds of cattle sheltering on the line. A party was left at Waipuku to give a
helping hand there. About a mile out from Midhirst, the watchers in the
train saw spires of flame shooting into the air from the bush all around the
Manganui sawmill and were convinced that it was ablaze. Arriving at Midhirst
station at 2.30 p.m. the party were met by settlers who told them that the
fire was just upon the town. Skinner coolly deployed his men, sending a
party back to the mill, others up the side roads, and then himself leading the
largest party south to meet the main threat to the township. He requested
that the train go on the four miles to Stratford taking a party to render
assistance along the Mountain Road, but the guard had his iron orders not
to go beyond Midhirst. With the wind continually rising in force, the local
defenders showing the effects of three days of watching and battling, and the
Guerin managed to borrow a horse from a settler. He made his way
south through parties of the fire brigade manfully battling for the township.
His first mile was through livid fire, which made him doubt that Midhirst
could be saved. Stratford he found in no position to send help, for the freshened wind had revived its fires and smoke was again streaming across the
place. In
The great struggle for the Manganui sawmill was vividly described by
the Taranaki News reporter who had set off in the opposite direction to his
Herald rival. The mill hands had been battling for 36 hours but were still in
good spirits. The mill's situation on the Manganui River and the arrival of
the relief reinforcements saved the day. The mill was kept soaking wet. After
an hour or two it had clearly been saved, and the relief party were moved to
meet other threats. The fire had been fought to a halt along Mountain Road,
but was outflanking the defenders to the east, threatening to sweep into
Salisbury Road, where about twenty settlers were scattered over a large extent of inflammable clearings. When it seemed impossible to contain this
fire the wind providentially dropped, and about 8 p.m. the situation suddenly came under control.
The second special arriving at 10 p.m. brought welcome refreshments,
and reinforcements to take over the main burden of keeping watch overnight. The special went on to Stratford, dropping patrol parties at the roads
along the way. At Stratford it awaited another special from
The worst was now over, but there were a few further local crises. These
were responded to efficiently, now that appropriate arrangements were in
place. There was a clear command structure with the resources of the railway at its disposal, adequate surveillance, and an organised flow of volunteer workers. The Manganui mill was again in danger overnight, but sufficient watchers were on hand to save it. On Saturday morning, 9 January,
Robinson and Skinner with their relief party patrolled the line right through
to Te Roti, finding the fires under control. In the afternoon parties were
taken out to Midhirst and Stratford to relieve those on duty there and keep
watch overnight. The train was kept at Inglewood with steam up, over Saturday night. The engine drivers and about twenty volunteers slept on the
train to be ready to respond to any alarm. Similar measures were continued
through Sunday and Monday. On Monday night Southey and Willey's
Relief and Reconstruction: Hawke's Bay
The Seventy Mile Bush disaster developed from a local to a regional scale
and the fight against the fires broadened in response. Relief and reconstruction moves broadened likewise as the scope of the problem became apparent and local and provincial leaders threshed out appropriate countermeasures. A good deal had to be clarified in the public mind over these weeks,
but right from the start no one questioned that it was a bush settler problem. When fire hit outside the bush, as at Waipawa or the Sherwood homestead, it was no matter for public aid, for such property should have been
insured. But in the bush it was different. Insurance offices were very shy
even of the bush townships, and were certainly not interested in risks on
bush settler clearings.1 It was as frontier pioneers, facing risks beyond the
usual reach of social and commercial protection, that the bush settlers were
treated as indubitably worthy of public sympathy and aid.2
The matter was first put before the Hawke's Bay public just before Christmas Hawke's Bay Herald's correspondence columns of 23 December, with subscriptions to be sent to Woods, stationmaster, Lecocq, postmaster, or Harwood, storekeeper. The paper's Takapau correspondent wrote
on 26 December that a generous response had met the need, but followed
up almost immediately to say he had acted prematurely as other sufferers
were coming to light and fires were still raging all around. The Herald's
office was added to the addresses receiving subscriptions.
The limitations of leaving the direction of relief to individual or local
initiatives became more evident as the need widened. On 31 December
Anthony S. Webb, Vicar of Ormondville, wrote to the Herald that local
subscription lists had been put out in his district on the 29th with the moneys to be entrusted to himself, the Lutheran minister George Sass, or sawmiller
Lewis Parsons. Now, he reported, the calamity was clearly beyond local resources. He illustrated the need with the case of August Gruebner, a German
3
But Webb also reported hearing of 25 homes and 6 sawmills totally destroyed in the Norsewood riding, and he can hardly have been able to satisfy
himself that Gruebner's was the worst case. On 4 January the Herald's
Ormondville correspondent wrote that there were many cases quite as bad,
and those of Jens Larsen and James Harwood were if anything harder. The
Waipawa Mail of 7 January reported Larsen's position. He was a widower
with three children. His wife had recently died after a long illness, which
had forced him into debt, and now the fire had burnt everything on his
section. Harwood, a labourer with a wife and four children, had been left
destitute, and did not even own the land on which his house was burnt.
Clearly, while the public required information on the need, it would not do
to have various advocates pushing their own special cases.
As the provincial leaders moved to meet the situation the Herald gave an
editorial lead to public opinion. On 2 January it gave its analysis of the
situation. After years of toil the bush families had just been attaining a little
comfort when they had been struck down. The Charitable Aid Board was
meeting their immediate needs of food and blankets, distributing them
through W.C. Smith, the local member of parliament. A good flow of parcels of clothes from private donors was also reaching the bush. But much
more was needed to give the burnt out settlers another start in life. Not only
had they lost homes and household goods, but also the means of retrieving
their positions. Their cattle had been scattered they knew not where, and
when they recovered them they had no grass or hay to feed them. Their
fences were gone, and months of labour in the form of posts, rails and sleepers stacked for sale had disappeared in the flames. All that many had left
were resolute hearts and strong arms, but unaided these would not be enough.
The Herald therefore commended its public appeal, and advised that it would
hold the fund until it could be distributed according to the varying needs.
There must, it affirmed, be a common fund, not spasmodic assistance to individual families. Providentially the Hon Mr Ballance was visiting the province and had come through the devastated districts, and if wise local arrangements were made he might well be willing to put the case for a government subsidy.
The Herald's next issue advertised a public meeting, called by the mayor
of Herald had been privy to the discussions behind this move, and set out to inform the bush settlers of the strategy emerging from the town discussions. A central committee was certain
to be set up by the Herald knew of many townsmen who would give liberally. The Hon Mr Ballance had been approached
and had promised to do his best to get a substantial government grant-in-aid.
At the large and representative public meeting on 5 January the mayor
opened proceedings with a telegram from Ballance announcing the government's contribution of £500 to the relief fund, conditional on the distribution being by a strong central committee. The meeting agreed to this approach, and the bush local committees seem to have accepted the arrangement without demur. The meeting was advised that Major Scully, assisted if
necessary by Henry Tiffen, would go through the distressed districts to assess the losses. Tiffen had already collected information to show the meeting
the necessity for careful enquiry. A man claiming for twenty cows was proved
to have had only four cows and two calves. Another claiming the loss of a
comfortable furnished cottage had only had a rudely constructed whare with
logs of wood for chairs and a bunk for a bed. There would also be cases
where insurance had to be taken into account. It would be difficult to fault
the arrangements for which the provincial leaders gained approval from the
public meeting. The prestigious central committee based in
The complexities of apportioning relief were well explained in a letter of
6 January to the Herald from W.F. Howlett, teacher at the Makaretu School.
To arouse strong public sympathy in support of the relief fund, a graphic
presentation of what the disaster meant in human terms was needed. Waipawa Mail did a competent job both in reporting
the fires and in following up with stories of individual experience. Two such
stories, in addition to those already cited, are those of Makotuku settlers
Cox and Popowski. Cox, a very poor settler with a wife and a large family,
had struggled on bravely until he had recently succeeded in getting a two-roomed cottage built on a deferred payment section. This uninsured home
with all its contents had been completely destroyed. Ludwig Popowski had
immigrated from
As the money flowed in the local committees got down to the task of
assessing the losses. There were two main local committees, one based on
Ormondville and the other on Makaretu. The committees were elected at
specially called public meetings. Each committee then subdivided its district and broke itself into a corresponding number of subcommittees. These
Waipawa Mail's Makaretu
correspondent wrote on 4 February that among the claims coming in were
some from half mythical regions in the hills north of Blackburn, whose
inhabitants had no reporters to sing their fame. The committee met on 15
February to go carefully into each claim and make annotations for the central committee's guidance. Some claims came from so far off that the committee had been unable to visit or get independent testimony on them, and
these were annotated accordingly.
Commissioners Tiffen and Scully set out on a flying visit through the
burnt out districts on 6 January. They first met the strong local committee
at Ormondville, which had undertaken supervision of claims from
Norsewood, Ormondville and Makotuku. Seeing the large area swept by
the fires they decided to divide their forces, with Scully working with the
Ormondville committee and Tiffen with the Makaretu one. Tiffen was conducted around Makaretu and Ashley Clinton by H.H. Bridge. On his return to
Despite some criticism of its ‘inactivity’ the Bush Fires Relief Committee
refused to dispense its funds until the fire season was clearly over, for
only then could all the losses be seen in perspective. Once the fires were
extinguished by the heavy rain at the end of January, Tiffen asked the local
committees to forward all claims with their comments as early as possible,
and the public were asked to complete their contributions by 8 February.
However the process took time, and the Relief Committee did not meet to
make its distribution until 24 February. It found that it had just over £1500
to share out. It divided the claims into ‘urgent’, to which in most instances
it gave half the estimated loss, and ‘less urgent’, to which a quarter of the
estimated loss was allotted. It distributed £1354, keeping the balance for any
special cases, and for some for which full details were still awaited. Committee expenses were only £38, so a good deal must have been absorbed by the
members themselves. In order to ensure that the money went to the distressed settlers and not to their creditors the Relief Committee resolved:
‘That relief be not granted to sufferers who are in debt unless creditors give
twelve months' credit for outstanding debts at 7 per cent interest’.4 The only
published details of the distribution were a broad breakdown by district, as
shown in Table 5.1.
The relief distribution can have covered only a fraction of the total losses.
There seems not to have been any estimate of this total, but there are some
indications of its scale. Early in January, in a first flush of enthusiasm after
its initial reconnaissance, the Ormondville committee estimated the total
losses in its area as between £8000 and £9000. Of this £Woodville Examiner's Makaretu correspondent explained that
the biggest loss at that settlement was the wiping out of the unreaped grass
seed harvest which he estimated would have sold for £Hawke's Bay Herald's Makaretu correspondent reported the total claims forwarded by the
Australasian Insurance and Banking Record
5shows £5,670 in insured losses (mainly total losses) to eight commercial premises. It lists six other commercial premises as uninsured total losses. These include a hotel, a boarding house, and the Post and Telegraph Office. As it is most likely that even the properties covered were under-insured, the Waipawa community must have been heavily hit. The insurance companies' payouts may have covered only something like half the actual losses, and there was no relief help for these town sufferers. In the Bush the sawmillers probably received nothing from the relief fund, yet in most cases they would have found it impossible to get adequate insurance cover. One heavy loser was Walter Gundrie. Newspaper reports give the uninsured losses at his Makotuku planing mill as £150, and his totally destroyed mill on the Makotuku to Norsewood road is said to have been worth £1300, but only insured for £400. And although the magnificent defence of Lewis Parsons's mill proved successful, he estimated that it would cost £150 to put his tramway back into a workable state. Obviously it is not possible to gain more than an impression of the scale of the uninsured losses in Waipawa and the Bush, but it may well have been in the order of £10,000. How this
There are no details of individual payments from the relief fund, with
one exception. In March James Harwood wrote urgently to the Waste Lands
Board asking that sections in the Matamau village settlement be thrown
After the fires the bush industries seem to have made a rapid recovery,
which owed as much to mutual self help as to outside relief assistance. Harry
Combs, who was a beginner pupil at the Makotuku School when the fires
raged through, has no doubt drawn on his father's yarns to describe how the
‘what's-the-use’ atmosphere at the burnt out sawmill gave place to ‘give-it-another-go’ as one or two of the hardier souls began to sort out what was
still usable from the ashes.6 Newspaper reports show two mills back at work
in Makotuku by early February. On their bush clearings the settlers also
took heart as the fresh green grass sprang up after the downpour, and they
calculated that the drought had broken in time for the winter's feed to be
assured.
Relief and Reconstruction: Taranaki
In contrast to Hawke's Bay, relief and reconstruction in Taranaki was considerably affected by regional disunity and rivalry. In Hawke's Bay the fires
had moved steadily from the level of local crises to that of regional disaster,
and the province's thinking had moved to keep pace with developments.
Once it became a provincial issue, there was no questioning of control from
For the first day or two Hawera Star of the 7th featured the fires as
major news, with full and circumstantial first-hand reports. Meanwhile the
good folk of Herald was
not very well informed. For first-hand information it had the sketchy impressions of J.H. Howell, the bridge contractors' labourer. Folk such as
Thomas Skinner, who could have given a measured and detailed report, had
stayed with the battle in Stratford. The Herald redeemed itself with very full
1 Helped by several borough councillors and others, Furlong got these
families settled into
The
But meanwhile on this very day Taranaki
Herald's editorial of Monday, 11 January, no doubt reflecting Herald of the 12th called Bush burn landscape below Mount
At Hawera Star's editorial of the 13th gave forceful expression to
local feeling. Could rudeness go any further than the Taranaki Herald's estimates were ten times
the present subscriptions. The secretary of the
A perusal of the colony's newspapers shows that the 2
James Paul, the Hawera Star and Yeoman pointed out, their appeals had been
aimed at the reinstatement of penniless settlers onto sections from which all
buildings, fences, grass and crops had been razed. Mayor Paul's mind had
not initially moved beyond the question of relieving immediate destitution.
Even in this
Once it was clear that the rain of 12 January had halted the fires, assessment of the losses began. For the Hawera Star had commissioned George Marchant to do a thorough survey of the ravaged districts and make estimates of the individual
loses. Marchant at first teamed up with Skinner and reported that all day
Friday the 16th he had ‘piloted Skinner around the by-roads, and all went
merry as a marriage bell’.3 But next morning it was a different story. Skinner
had discovered what Marchant thought he had known all along, that
Marchant was acting for the Star and not specially for the Star he explained the principles on which he was
working. Log fencing he was placing no value on, buildings and sundries
Star of 21 January, was £4,300. He insisted that his approach had been very conservative, and took no account of many kinds of
real loss, such as those sustained by cows going dry or by the forced sale of
stock. He considered that a full estimate would amount to at least half as
much again. He also pointed out that there had been heavy losses south of
Ngaere and across the Waingongoro, outside of his district.
Something had to be done about the Auckland Weekly News's
The feeling is so strong … throughout the rest of the district that I feel
bound to record the fact that the action of the committee is universally
condemned. I cannot see the sense or reason of their action, and it is equally
inexplicable to anyone else. I cannot, in common fairness, ascribe it to local
jealousy, to which it is generally attributed, but think that overcome ‘With
the exuberance of their own generosity’—to metamorphose a well-known
phrase—they saw blindly, and imagined that they could meet the losses out
of their own pockets. The resolution of the committee appears to have been
ill-considered and passed on the spur of the moment, as neither of the local
papers support it, and they are now promulgating the lamest excuses for their
action.4
This correspondent is unusual in not seeing any local jealousy in the
matter. He implies some praise for the generosity of Taranaki Herald contributed to smoothing things
over by explaining that the differences had come about because ‘all the information—perhaps not exaggerating but intensifying the distress—seems
to have gone to 5 Under pressure from public opinion the New Plymouth leaders responded to diplomacy undertaken by Taranaki politicians
Harry Atkinson and Felix McGuire, the mayor of
The committee of delegates met in Stratford on 20 January.
On 9 February the five commissioners reconvened in Stratford. Harry
Atkinson joined them for a discussion on whether to ask the government
for a money grant or for work for the settlers completing Opunake Road.
The latter course was adopted and, on the application of local members of
parliament Atkinson, Trimble and Samuel, the government granted £1000.
The commissioners next turned to the distribution of the relief funds. They
divided the sufferers into three classes: first, those deemed best able to bear
their losses, to receive 4s to 5s in the £; second, those who, while not destitute, would have difficulty in getting through the winter, to receive 6s 8d to
7s 6d in the £; and third, those absolutely destitute, to receive in full. Most
applicants had expressed a preference for aid in cash, but it was decided that
Bauchope and Barton made the final decisions in Stratford on 15 and 16
February. The claims totalled £7,102. After receiving Marchant's report on
the reviving pastures, the two commissioners whittled their estimates of the
losses down to £3,881. £1,789 5s 6d had been subscribed to the relief fund.
Having apportioned this among the sufferers, the commissioners met them
individually to give their decisions, and to arrange how it was to be taken
out in terms of wire, iron, timber, grass seed etc. Schedules were then sent to
the successful contractors. The
Wellington and Auckland Provinces
When mayor James Paul of 1 And
indeed as early as 4 January the Manawatu Standard's editor was writing,
‘Scarcely a newspaper in the
The news that flowed into 2 This was of course well covered by insurance, and the fires in the surrounding countryside did no substantial damage, but the city fire and the ever present sense of danger must have made
the citizens more sympathetic to sufferings further afield, and the government more ready to respond to requests for aid. The last weeks of 3 The Hutt Valley was frequently obscured from New Zealand Times put the record straight
with accurate first-hand reports from these districts. The local fires were
limited and in the main well under control. Most of the smoke must have
come from much further afield.
Much smoke may have come from the Wairarapa, where by Wednesday
afternoon, 6 January, Wairarapa Daily of 7 January complained bitterly of ‘many instances in which fires have been deliberately lighted for the sake of burning off, and this in spite of frequent warnings. From 4
There were also fires to the east. All the bush surrounding the township of Taueru was alight and a large area of grass had been burnt on nearby Brancepeth run. To the south Carterton was enveloped in smoke, the area west of the town was a mass of smouldering fire, and the heat was almost unbearable. There was fear the fire might get into the long dry grass of the neighbouring runs leading to ‘a repetition of the fire that was experienced about fourteen years ago’. Those with the time to spare could gaze with unprotected eyes on the sun which appeared as an orange coloured disc with a large sunspot just above the centre. However most eyes concentrated on the more mundane discerning of shifts in the force and direction of the winds on which the district's immediate fortunes depended. Fortunately, after a shift to the east on the afternoon of the 7th, the wind changed to the south overnight, bringing up thick clouds, and by morning the Wairarapa townships were clear of smoke and the fire danger was over for a time. There was only a fortnight's respite before fires were again raging. On 20 January a fire swept a considerable area of West Taratahi. On the 22nd a fire closed the road near Tauweru for a short time and interrupted the telegraph line. Much fencing on the Brancepeth and Abbotsford runs was destroyed. Rain at the end of January put an end to Wairarapa's fire danger for the season. Despite widespread alarms and various losses the winds had been kind to the valley.
Across the ranges the citizens of 5
Feilding did not possess even a defunct fire brigade but its councillors
were not prepared to take things so seriously. With many townsfolk edgy on
account of dry wells and empty rainwater tanks and the Feilding Star castigating them for inaction, the only effective action they would take was to
arrange for a bugler to sound the alarm should a fire break out.6
Perhaps fortunately, the hurried preparations in 7
Over the next few days great masses of smoke could be seen rising from
the bush settlement frontiers to the east and north of Feilding and various
rumours of disaster ran through the town. In fact all threatened houses were
saved, but much grass and fencing was lost. Heavy rain on 26 January put
an end to the longest drought in the experience of the settlers. A return of
dry weather brought another burning season in late February and early
March. Large areas of bush had been felled in the Fitzherbert district, above
the bluffs of the south bank of the Manawatu River opposite Palmerston
North. The Manawatu Standard reported the ‘gorgeous spectacle’ of the
night of 26 February. Vast dense volumes of smoke rolled upwards and were
illuminated by the flames. The fire lit up the surrounding countryside, and
the hills had a weird, grand appearance. Great bush fires continued in the
Fitzherbert district for about a week, giving rise at one stage to rumours in
Feilding that 8
In the 9 So too did the batteries
of the quartz-mining industry of the Hauraki and Ohinemuri goldfields.10
Fires were well established in the swamps around Hamilton by Christmas Waikato Times correspondent away on the west coast at Raglan
reported that, although the district was enjoying cloudless days, smoke often abounded because of the heavy fires raging in the 11
In the mining settlements to the east the battles were with bush fires. In
the bush at Waiorongomai, near
As the month wore on both swamp and bush fires became more widespread, while one after another the mining batteries came to a halt. At Te
Rahu near Te Awamutu a bush fire was spreading to threaten two saw mills.
Then came heavy rain over the
By about 6 January serious fires were burning on both the west and east
coasts of 12
On 8 January a fire spread east of the railway line at Waimauku, in bush for which brothers J. and J.R. Foster had the cutting rights. A change of wind on the 9th brought it blazing westwards. It leapt the Kaipara River, travelled with great force through scrub, crossed the railway line and threatened the Waimauku railway station and a large new building belonging to the Fosters. This building consisted of a general store, a butcher's shop and a gum store. The kauri forest which the Fosters' bushmen were working had been pretty well cut over earlier, but they had a good deal of timber felled on the slopes above the railway line, waiting to be hauled down for railing out. Early in the outbreak a bullock team had a narrow escape. Fosters' men assisted by neighbouring settlers were fully extended for several days in containing the fire. The station and store were successfully defended. The felled logs up the slopes were saved by deluging them with water brought from the creek by bucket chain. But some valuable standing kauri timber and 200 tons of cut firewood were lost. Sawmillers with interests in the surrounding hills watched the fire with apprehension. They had large areas of standing timber at risk, as well as large quantities of cut logs waiting for freshes. They seem to have escaped any serious damage. The only other significant loss of this dry spell was in the Bay of Islands where a large bush fire raging in the Waimate district destroyed a substantial recently built bridge. But not until late February was there sufficient rain to bring logs down the streams to put all the mills back to work
The South Island
If 1
The season's first serious fire raged in Seaward Bush, south of
In the early hours of the next morning a fire broke out in Lumsden.
Fanned by a strong north-west wind it totally destroyed Bradmore's general
store and residence, the Colonial Bank, Maley's boot shop, Stanford's store
and residence, and Fraser's blacksmith shop. Lacking a water supply the
handful of settlers could do little even to save the buildings' contents, though
they did get out Bradmore's household furniture and a few articles of
Stanford's. These blows were softened by £2,365 in insurance, but neither
the blacksmith's shop nor its contents carried any cover.2
Otago seems to have come through the drought with no serious fires, but
Glenmark Station
In late November fire was noticed in a gorse hedge beside the railway a
little north of 3 All were contained until on the morning of 27
February one beside the line near Hawarden got away before a strong nor’-
wester and swept across six miles of country, burning off some 5,000 acres of
native grass. Land belonging to G.H. Moore of Glenmark station was completely swept with the loss of 4,000 sheep. The English grasses of D. and A.
McFarlane's neighbouring property halted the fire but it destroyed all their
boundary fence. To the north it swept F. Perriot's property of all the feed
remaining from the drought, and took some lines of fencing and a stack of
grass seed. Settler Johnstone saved his grass seed stacks by ploughing round
them. A mile of railway fence and three miles of telegraph poles were
also destroyed.4 On 8 March a much more extensive fire on Glenmark
station swept over at least 50,000 acres of tussock land, spreading to the
Figure 8.1
5 A Lyttelton Times reporter went by train
to view the scene. He described passing over ‘a bare blackened expanse dotted with charred stumps of burned tussocks' stretching as far as the eye
could see. Settlers told him how on Wednesday night, 10 March, enormous
sheets of flame raged through the valleys beyond the plain, moving faster
than a galloping horse. Others described spending an anxious night in the
path of the blinding, suffocating smoke.6
About noon on 22 December a fire broke out in the bush at 7
The same recurrent nor'wester caused anxious days much nearer to
8
At Little River on Banks Peninsula a much more persistent fire harried
the settlers from early December until early March. Beginning on Harry
White's bush clearing, it spread to his neighbours James Watkins and
P. Sorensen, greatly damaging their grass seed crops. Seeming to have burnt
itself out, it unaccountably broke out again in calm weather on 6 January,
covering the same ground and taking what was left of Sorensen's grass seed
crop as well as an unoccupied house and shed. Then it swept into James
Reynold's grass seed crop, consuming some 80 acres of it, and also threatened
A Little River scene in the 1880s. On the left is the Maori Church built by Noah Walters
(see p. 140)
9
Early in January there were several large grass fires to the south and south-west of 10
The following afternoon 40 settlers in and around West Melton fought a
similar battle. Their early exertions were in defence of the Wesleyan Chapel.
They then realised that a small weatherboard house occupied by an old man
was in the path of the flames. They broke open his door to find him asleep,
unaware of his danger. With difficulty the house was saved, and after a hard
three hour battle the fire was subdued. The main losses were in gates, fences
and feed.11
That same afternoon there was another battle a few miles to the south,
between Rolleston and 12
There were also great blazes on both sides of the Rakaia River. We have
already told of the one south of the river on 7 January, and of William
Harrison's innovative use of his traction engine.13 The one on the north side
got away in tussock between Dunsandel and Bankside on 24 December and
showed what could happen if an outbreak was not quickly contained. Apparently men working with a traction engine had emptied its cinder pan
and then taken it away to a water race for water. When they returned the
fire, fanned by a strong nor'wester, was away among the tussocks, and they
were quite unable to contain it. Rapidly extending its front, it swept south-east as fast as a horse could gallop, swallowing up a platelayer's cottage, and
then the house, sheds and implements of Stewart's farm, Highbank, near
Bankside. It razed Richards' small homestead out on the plains, and in a
very short time was sweeping across Heslerton run. Fortunately the Heslerton
sheep had been mustered to the homestead the previous day for dipping, or
many of them would have been lost. Both the homestead and most of the
flock were saved, though forty sheep were smothered while the flames were
being fought back from the sheep yards. The run's iron woolshed about five
miles from the homestead was burnt down. Moving on, the fire demolished
the home and all the buildings and yards on Washbourne's farm. Now burning
on a three mile front it quickly covered another mile or two to take the
cottage and buildings on Kendal's farm. Next in its path was Charles Hurst's
Oakleigh run with a substantial recently built homestead and extensive
farm buildings. Fortunately the settlers were by now well alerted. Hurst's
14
Pastoral 15 On 24 and 25 December a fire swept 6,000 acres of hill pasture
inland from the railhead near Dashwood, south of 16
It is not easy to build up a picture of the fires in the scattered bush settlements of the
Around Christmas bush fires were burning in the Para and Koromiko
Valleys between 17 Around
New Year a busy flow of travellers on 18 On New Year's day Pelorus
Valley was almost deserted for the celebrations at nearby Havelock, as the
whole district enjoyed a highly successful day of sports, enlivened by the
Nelson Bijou Band who came in on the morning coach. When the homes of
neighbouring Pelorus Valley settlers Daniel Wilson and Henry Bennett came
under threat Mrs Wilson was the only person at home to defend them. She
first put out a fire at Bennetts house and then rushed back to defend her
own. She saved this ‘with great trouble’, but meanwhile the fire had regained
a hold at Bennett's and burnt it to the ground. Next day two horsemen
caught surrounded by fire in the Pelorus Valley ‘had to lay their heads on
their horses' sides, and let them take their course’. Their steeds brought
them safely through. The fires burnt telegraph poles in the valley and broke
the line, keeping linesmen busy for days.19 In mid January Onamalutu had
its days of testing when an extensive bush fire on Crown land threatened to
sweep the valley. Settler Rickerson saved his home by hastily ploughing a fire
break.20 Among
As an important major node in the colony's coastal shipping network,
Nelson city seemed more aware of the ports of neighbouring provinces than
of its own hinterland. Yet, reported or not, there were fires. From early in the
new year the town was plagued with smoke. To the west Tasman Bay was
lost in the haze. Each evening the setting sun was a blood red ball in the
murky air. By mid January fire itself had come close to the city, raging in the
bush up the Maitai Valley. On the 14th it took the home of a recently widowed man with 13 children, the youngest just able to walk, and a newspaper
appeal was made for their relief. The Maitai fire and those in other nearby
districts kept smoke billowing over Nelson and its surrounding hills until
the drought broke late in the month.21
Early in January the Newmans' coaches began bringing in news of great
fires raging beyond Spooner's Range in the valleys of the Clark, Hope and
Motupiko Rivers. On Wednesday, 6 January, after a pause at John Ribet's
accommodation house at the Hope, Thomas Newman resumed his journey
towards Nelson. He had not gone far when the wind drove fire across his
path. Several times he was compelled to stop. At one point the fire was
blown right upon his coach, singeing his whiskers, badly burning his hand,
and blistering the coach wheels. Pressing on he was again caught by fire and
his horses considerably singed. The smoke was so dense that he kept his
22
At Grey River Argus of 11 January told of fires on that
coast, where none had been seen before, far from any settlement. The masters of coasters reported the smoke of bush fires all along the coast between
Nelson and 23 By the time the drought
broke Reefton looked a different place. Much of the bush around it had
been burnt, ‘baring the rugged surface of the country, and showing the hills
in all their unattractiveness'.24
Fire in the City
As smoke and disaster reports flowed in to the colony's main cities their
business centres were being baked as tinder dry as the fire-plagued countryside. In the event they escaped major fires, but 1
The one major fire since then had been in Manners Street in March
2 In the early
1880s 3
Following the 4 the buildings and
businesses affected in each case were remarkably similar. In 5 They still looked across to the waters of the harbour, for although two
years of reclamation work had created 6
In 7 As one of the province's most
rienced hotelkeepers he had taken over the Branch Hotel n 8 The licensing committee's
annual meeting on 9 At the hearing it may have
helped Urwin that one of the five committeemen was his neighbour a little
further along the Quay, plumber John Edward Hayes, and that the police
Figure 9.1
10 Urwin produced favourable testimonials and
handed in his boarders' register which showed a marked increase in lodgers
since he had taken over. Goodall reported the police perfectly satisfied with
the way the house was run. Considerable improvements had been made,
and Urwin and his family lived in a cottage behind the hotel to leave more
room for boarders.
Next door to the south, with its stables behind, was the 11 The Saloon had been expensively furnished, and apparently served seafood to the accompaniment of music, as a piano was lost in
the fire, and a violin was the only thing saved. Thomas Myers, picture dealer
and picture frame maker, had moved quite recently from Willis Street, though
he had earlier been in Lambton Quay.12 William Spiller also seems to have
moved north onto the Quay. His music shop was probably a development
from the Academy of Music he conducted in his Boulcott Street home.13
Others in the fire were Mrs Nelson's fruit shop, Fred Radford, photographer, with rooms above Myers's shop, and George Aldous, hairdresser and
tobacconist. Like Hayes, Aldous had gold rush experience, having been on
the Victorian and 14
On the afternoon of 28 December Thomas Myers had been melting glue
in the grate of the room behind his shop. He expected this little fire to have
burnt itself out by 6 p.m. At 4.30 p.m. he went to tea at his house not far
away on Thomas Myers's advertisement,
On the 29th Thomas Myers got up at 6.30 a.m. and called at his shop
about 7.15 a.m. As the sun was shining brightly he got the sun blinds from
under the counter and put them up. He then took the newspaper from
under the front door, stepped along a by now busy street to the
George Aldous, Myers's neighbour to the north, lived with his wife and
children above his shop. He had been out early on the 29th and returned
about 7.30 a.m., noticing no indications of fire. Just after 8 a.m. he went out
to call a friend who had slept at the Queen's Hotel to come to breakfast.
We ran back, and saw smoke issuing from the building occupied by Mr
Myers and Mr Smart. I could scarcely tell where the fire came from, as the
span of the two shops was only about 20 feet. I ran through my house to the
back yard, which used to serve for the three shops. I saw the smoke coming
from Mr Myers' premises. There was no doubt about that. I tried the back
door, and finding it locked I burst it in with my foot. The flames were rolling
around the centre of the middle roont, which was used as a workshop, and I
hought if I had a bucket or two of water I could put it out. I think I could
easily have put it out with a small hose. If I had some of those hand-grenades
I think I could have put it out. That was my idea at the time. I told my man
to fetch some water, but by the time he arrived the flames were rolling round,
and the fire was spreading very rapidly. I then saw that it was no use trying to
put it out, and went out and closed the door to prevent a draught. When I
got back to my house I found the place full of smoke, and my wife and
family at the top of the stairs. I despatched them away in their night-dresses,
and tried to save some of my clothes. I only managed to save a few trinkets.15
We have already seen (in Chapter 1) how George Smart and William Duffy, slumbering late after their long hours in the Oyster Saloon, made their last-minute escapes through the upstairs windows.
The first to notice the smoke was probably John Henry Davis, barman at
the Occidental Hotel, across the Quay, almost immediately opposite to
Myers's. He saw it from the bar about 7.45 a.m. and on going to the door
could see that it was coming from the window above Myers's shop. He immediately rang the Manners Street fire brigade. Firemen were soon on the
scene from both Manners Street and the Brandon Street station, just around
the corner from the blaze. The brigade was commanded by Captain Archibald
Whiteford, a builder whose home was strategically situated on Flagstaff Hill,
overlooking the main business district, so that he was able to scramble down
quickly on hearing the alarm. About 50 at the time, Whiteford was Edinburgh born, and had worked at building in Glasgow before emigrating to
New Zealand as a young man. In the 1870s Whiteford had commanded one
of the city's two volunteer brigades, and he was chosen to command the
municipal brigade when it was formed in 16 On
Two hoses brought from the Brandon Street station were quickly attached to the hydrant in front of the Occidental Hotel, but they were carelessly run out across the street with kinks that caused them to burst as soon
as the water was turned on, rendering them useless. This may well have been
a result of inexperienced members of the public being allowed to help with
the work. Whiteford knew that his force was under strength, and throughout the fire allowed helpers to join his team. The more useful of these were
members of the old volunteer brigades who had not been taken on when the
municipal brigade was formed. The
As Whiteford's team built up to its full, but still inadequate, strength he
was able to get nine streams of water onto the blaze. But, surprisingly, they
flowed at a pitifully low pressure, even though the Council's engineers, on
hearing the alarm, had promptly cut off water to other parts of the city to
increase pressure in the central business district. What had happened was
that the alarm had set occupiers as far away as Courtenay Place on a precautionary hosing down of their tinder dry buildings. Whiteford was expecting
pressure from the Lambton Quay hydrants to increase from its usual
140 pounds to 150 pounds. Instead the gauge in the municipal buildings
registered only 60, and it was probably less on the Quay. With this feeble
Earlier in the year the volunteer fire police and salvage corps would have
controlled such a crowd. Businessman George Vance Shannon JP fostered
and commanded this force for a number of years. When it was reformed in
17 Some of its
former members did help with salvaging on 29 December.
With feeble resistance the fire continued to gain ground. Numerous volunteers salvaged what they could from the threatened shops, while the police under Inspector Goodall did their best to maintain order. All Spiller's
pianos and organs were got out, to be drenched with the water that was
blowing about. One valuable piano suffered from use as a grandstand to
view the flames. Much of Farmer's stock was lost, though some furniture
was got away from the front shop. Most of the
Meanwhile the fire met little resistance in burning back towards The
Terrace. Onlookers loudly expressed their views on the bungling activities
of the small party of brigadesmen sent to this area. One of their hoses got so
twisted as to be useless, they ducked from one burning building to another,
failing to get enough water onto any of them to do any good. Finally they
just went away. They had, of course, been recalled by their hard-pressed
superintendent. Thus the storerooms behind Farmer's, the Meat Co's stables
and James's four cottages were allowed to ignite and quietly burn away.
Women and children scrambled from the cottages, leaving most of their
household effects to the flames. Among those looking down on this havoc
from 18 As she watched, a spark ignited her dress and, fanned
by the strong wind, her clothing was soon a mass of flames. Some men
standing by her quickly extinguished the flames, but her dress was destroyed
and she suffered slight burns. Her interest in the fire was more than mere
Across the Quay all the premises from the New Zealand Times office, on
the corner of Waring Taylor Street, to the Central Club, on the corner of
Grey Street, were closed and their occupants stood guard as the wind showered them with sparks. Several buildings were briefly on fire, including the
Occidental Hotel and Dr Henry's residence beyond it, G. Thomas's store on
The brigade finally halted the spread of the fire along the frontage of the Quay when it came up against the Branch Hotel's corrugated iron walls to the north and Hayes's Plumbing Works to the south. Hayes's place probably owed its survival to a fortunate coincidence. Two days earlier a special service pipe had been laid on to his premises so he could try out a new water engine he had built. Playing a hose attached to this pipe, employee Thomas Grey stood his ground as flames destroying Mrs Paul's shop next door licked around him. He came out of the ordeal badly scorched and with face and hands badly swollen. By 10.30 a.m. the danger was over. The fire left a stretch of smouldering ruins, punctuated here and there with tall gaunt-looking chimney stacks.
Of course this city fire caused nothing like the deprivation suffered by
burnt out bush settlers. Insurance covered most losses. The claims totalled
nearly £9,000.19 (To get this in perspective, most of these small shop buildings were valued at under £500.) Within a few days the Equitable Insurance
Association was advertising letters from William James and Thomas Myers,
both dated 7 January, expressing thanks for the prompt arrival of their
cheques. Most of the burnt out shopkeepers were quickly back into business. Aldous advertised that ‘After Cremation’ old friends could see him
across the road in Moeller's sample rooms, next to the Occidental Hotel,
and try his cremated cigarettes and devilled cigars and tobacco. At a special
meeting on 4 January the City Council declined Aldous's request for
permission to erect a temporary building of wood and iron on his burnt
out site. He promised to remove it in ten or twelve weeks for a brick shop to
be built, but the council no longer trusted such promises. Others who
While Evening Post's
initial report on the fire commented on the brigade's lack of direction and
discipline. Brigadesmen were ‘running about spurting water in all directions’ and there was ‘manifest bungling’. The initial editorial comment noted
the insufficient strength of the brigade, the poor condition of its hoses, and
the water pressure problems. But even so, the fire could have been confined
to a much smaller area had there not been ‘great want of judgment’ in directing the brigade's efforts. The following day in ‘Additional Particulars’ on
the fire the Post had a further point of criticism of Whiteford:
It is still a matter of very general surprise that the water supply should have
been so ineffective but when it is mentioned as a fact that the whole of the
water used for extinguishing the flames was taken from a 6-inch and an 8-inch pipe on Lambton Quay, instead of the 21-inch main in 20
In a longer and more considered editorial the Post commented that it
was ‘scarcely possible to rightly estimate the magnitude of the danger which
the city so narrowly escaped’. Most of the city's business centre might well
have been swept away. The city council must have the brigade at sufficient
strength to meet such emergencies, since the insurance companies had opted
out of any responsibility in the matter. But the main criticism was directed
at Whiteford.
Superintendent Whiteford is full of courage and of energy, but he is not a
good general. He lacks the coolness, the judgment and the tactical skill
necessary to enable him to direct his force how best to cope with the
21
The Evening Press reported on the fire in much the same terms. Its editorial comment, however, showed rather more sympathy for the brigade's predicament. The Press considered it ‘simply disgraceful’ that the whole of central
… we must admit there seemed a great want of ability to grasp the situation
displayed at the first outbreak. There did not seem to be any plan of operations at all, but men ran hither and thither instead of being at once posted
where they could do the most good.22
Onlookers wrote to the papers making further specific suggestions and
were very free with their complaints. ‘Joe Absolon’ ( Evening Post, 31 December) averred that ‘greater mismanagement by the Fire Brigade I never witnessed…. It was very conspicuous that Captain Whiteford had no control
whatever over his men …’ He had heard one bystander remark that the
brigade men were paid two shillings per hour and so were in no hurry to
finish the job. Both ‘Joe Absolon’ and ‘Argus No. I’ wanted to know why
hand grenades had not been used. Hand grenades, which worked on the
same principles as the modern fire extinguisher, were an innovation which
had recently been impressively demonstrated on the reclamation. ‘Pro Bono
Publico’ got his letter into the Evening Press on the day of the fire. He had
been ‘very much amused but not altogether surprised at the playful antics of
our local firemen this morning’:
… three of them kept themselves engaged in watering the front boards of a
building for fully half an hour, the back premises enjoying a quiet ‘burn’
meanwhile. While watching these individuals, someone brought along a
ladder, and having placed it against a house went quietly away. Bye and bye
another made his appearance with a ladder and imitated his predecessor. Last
but not least amusing came some others with a hose and standing at the foot
of the ladder played away merrily. This was one phase of the fire. Another was
that a ladder was left till the ends were burnt off.23
When reasonable suggestions were made to some of these men they replied ‘in terms more forcible than polite’.
Fortunately for the brigadesmen they had some defenders. ‘Old Shell’
( Evening Post, 12 January) expressed himself as grieved by the intemperance
of ‘Joe Absolon's' comments about the 2s an hour.
… from my own past experience, I know that there is not one man in the brigade that would not just as soon be a volunteer fireman as a paid one, as with volunteers there is no bind, and you can often forget to hear the bell; but with a paid brigade every man is fined 45 per hour for every hour that the fire burns when he is absent, and he is also fined £1 125 if he misses a practice. … what little there is to be made out of the brigade every member would gladly sacrifice for the purpose of being a volunteer fireman, and trust to the generosity of the good, kind public for donations, which, in volunteer times, came in very freely.
As for the firemen's reputed rebuffs and insolence, ‘Old Shell’ wanted the fire police and salvage corps reactivated to protect the firefighters ‘from the appeals and interference of a half-mad, greatly excited, multitude of people’. ‘Old Shell’ proceeded to give an example of one of the many cases of insult and interference that the brigade were subjected to.
The flood of public criticism led the mayor to write to Whiteford on 5
January for a report on the fire, asking him to respond in particular to the
newspaper charges of incompetence, to an assertion that he had refused the
use of Messrs J.E. Nathan and Co's chemical fire engine, and to allegations
that some brigade members had behaved rudely to some of the public assisting at the fire. Whiteford's reply, dated 11 January, was read at the council
meeting of 15 January, and printed in full in the Evening Post of 16 January.
He gave a lucid account of the problems his brigade had faced, and explained with careful factual information that much of the criticism was based
on ignorance or misinformation. He described how the lack of any fireproof
party walls made the whole block of buildings into a fire trap. He explained
how the public themselves had thwarted his men by robbing them of water
pressure. He carefully explained that the size of the main from which the
water was drawn made no difference to its pressure. Had he drawn water
through hoses from the 21-inch main in
Whiteford's restrained and reasoned reply failed to save his captaincy.
Early in May three prominent citizens, J.E. Evans, A. McDonald and Alexander McLeod, waited on the council with a memorial asking that Whiteford
be retained. The memorial pointed out that even in 24
Whiteford's fate was doubtless decided by the Public Works Committee's advocacy of a very well-qualified younger man with prestigious backers.
He was R.A. Page, an engineer with the 25
Part Two
Anatomy of a Settler Society
Anatomy of a Settler Society
Specific events and unique experiences are of the essence of history. For a
past community to become real to us we need some good stories about it.
And, as novelist Elizabeth Bowen reminds us, ‘the good story is a succession
of effective Nows'.1 To be effective a ‘Now’ must be reasonably rich in the
seemingly trivial specifics that enable us to recreate past scenes in the mind's
eye. Besides providing imaginative entry into the past, the ‘Nows’ of Part
One have several virtues for the social historian. They have thrust into the
spotlight a range of characters whose lives were usually anonymous and unrecorded. They have depicted something of the intricate context of those
lives. But in giving a ‘feel’ of the past through stories of particular persons in
specific circumstances one avoids disrupting the flow with extensive probings
into meaning and significance. One also sketches in contexts without adequately explaining the many changes that time has brought.
Part Two probes and discusses the structures and patterns of the New
Zealand settler society whose general character has become apparent in Part
One. We proceed with several advantages. Our dissection follows our having viewed this society as a functioning whole, as country and town, rich
and poor, wrestled with the common problem of disaster by fire. We can
point to Part One for pertinent illustrations of the patterns under discussion without having to disrupt our argument with the details of the stories.
Part Two is deliberately labelled an ‘anatomy’ to convey the picture of an
arrangement of interacting systems. Practising historians know that history
is not one thing, but many things. To settle for one structure or pattern as
the answer to understanding this settler society would lead to writing a good
deal of reductionist nonsense. Since Part Two is not primarily concerned
with the fires, but with the society in which they occurred, we will draw
freely on further evidence from other contexts. However we will be concerned throughout with New Zealand society at this particular point in its
history—where it had come from, how it was functioning, and where it
thought it was going. The discussion should repeatedly illuminate the narrative of Part One, but it will often range beyond the agenda provided by
Part One.
The choice of patterns has emerged from working with the source
The stories of the fires will further help us in two particular ways. The emergency situations forced immediate responses from the settlers under the glare of colonial publicity—responses which help us to grasp their characters and hierarchies of values. The same publicity showed how the fires cut across the settlers' plans and programmes, giving us invaluable information on their life objectives, and on their strategies for coping with problems and making progress towards the ends they were seeking. From Chapter 11 on we will turn our attention to selected areas of colonial experience, and examine the settlers operating as agents within the structures sketched in by our patterns.
Patterns
Even the most expert historians are in constant danger of falling into anachronism by reading a present day understanding into a past situation. Our first pattern reminds us that the most common everyday words subtly shift in significance and connotation as they pass through time.
Settler New Zealand was in the process of transition from a traditional to a
modern understanding of time. In 1 We will briefly survey these rhythms and then
apply our findings to the Stratford firestorm of
While community life tended towards a monthly rhythm, home life was
largely shaped by the week. The linchpin of the colonial week was provided
by its inheritance of the strong British tradition of ‘Sunday Observance’.
Whether one was a church attender or not, Sunday was commonly observed
as a special ‘at home’ day, with leisure for family and friends to visit. Sunday
preparations usually began in earnest with Friday as the weekly baking day.
2 For rural men work was less shaped by the
day of the week than by the weather and the procession of the seasons,
which brought an ever changing succession of tasks such as sowing and
harvesting, bush felling and burning off, shearing, mustering, droving and
road contracting.
Let us see how the Stratford firestorm fits into these patterns. Mid afternoon on this summer Wednesday probably found the families at their most
dispersed. With two long holiday weekends behind them (for Christmas
day and New Year's day had fallen on Fridays), many men will have dispersed to distant work on contracts or wage labour. For the children it was
summer school holidays. Older children will have been left responsible for
various chores by absent fathers. But whether set by father or mother, house,
farmyard and farm chores will generally have been morning and evening
tasks. The terror of the fire seems to have been deepened by the dispersal of
many of the families in the free time of a holiday summer afternoon. The
drama of the following night was heightened by its darkness; the previous
evening had been new moon. There was no moonlight for the
‘There are three aspects of life in this district—town, country, bush’, wrote
Hawke's Bay school inspector 3 The sharp distinction between open
country and bush has already been discussed in Chapter 2, as it formed a
necessary background to the account of the fires. We must now consider
Wood carters, mid 1880s
Hawke's Bay might be taken as an exemplar of a typical New Zealand
region of the 1880s. ‘Town’ was 4 But even here industrialisation had been based on coal, and it had also replaced firewood as the
main urban fuel.
I explained the importance of this pattern for Victorian New Zealand in a
5 This settler community was essentially a village world,
but a village world that was responding to ideas and influences that were
global in the scope of their origins. ‘New Zealand’ was of relatively less
importance as a frame of reference. New Zealand's founding stock was drawn
predominantly from village life in the Old World, and the village outlook
which they brought with them was sustained and reinforced by the colony's
geography. New Zealand-born 6 Here
again there is a significant parallel with the 7 In New Zealand this localism found political expression in a multitude of local bodies. Thus the Hawera Star of 3 August
The Counties Act of Budget, that in his district ‘the whole
science of politics … may be summed up as roads, roads, ROADS'.8 The
strength of the desire for this matter to be in local hands is shown by the fact
that by 9 The situation as regards appointments varied
from board to board, but even the 10
Each significant New Zealand locality thus became an arena for continuous debate, lobbying, decision and action on important public matters.
While much of the necessary discussion and exchange of information took
place in public meetings and neighbourly conversation, the colonial press
also reflected and gave voice to this localism. Not only was the press widely
present in small town New Zealand, but it reached down to give a remarkably extensive coverage of village affairs. The elections and proceedings of
the many local committees and boards were well reported. Correspondence
columns carried much ‘parish pump’ material. A network of ‘Our Own
From these local correspondents one can learn of a rich range of grassroots social and cultural life. I will comment here on one aspect only. J.C
Dakin has recently shown that the typical adult education institution of
later colonial New Zealand, following the decline of the mechanics' institutes which the early settlers brought with them, was the strongly localised
mutual improvement society.11 This was in sharp contrast to
So much for the village, now for the globe. The most powerful of the
global influences impinging on the settler villages were those originating in
the Old World homelands, mediated by both memory and continuing strong
contacts. Typically a New Zealand settler locality was invigorated by the
mixing of blood, ideas and customs drawn from all parts of
‘The Village and the Globe’ was a strong pattern, but the settlers' views of
their place in the world were an untidy and confusing mix which cannot be
neatly crystallised under simple labels. To get across something of this diversity we will briefly examine the conflicting pattern of ‘locality, region and
colony’. Regional consciousness had been there from the founding days,
owing much to the regional character of the Wakefield settlements and the
provincial period, and much also to the sheer facts of geography. It continued to have more reality in the settlers' minds than the 12 So the settlers' mental maps were an untidy
jumble in a state of flux, and we must be careful not to falsify the picture by
too much tidying up.
In emigrating to New Zealand the settlers moved from a rapidly modernising world to a more primitive one. For many the move was a deliberate
choice of an opportunity to continue in traditional ways rather than adapt
to the changes which modernisation was bringing. Others however were
seeking opportunities to apply modern techniques in a promising new environment. The colonial scene was inevitably involved in the world-wide tussle between traditional and modern ways. Traditional patterns, often reminiscent of medieval England, were common in the primitive conditions of
the early settlement stages. To illustrate this let us draw on some of the
features noted by Maurice Keen in his recent English Society in the Later
Middle Ages 1348–1500.13
It was a world of wood. ‘Even in areas such as the Cotswolds, where
good stone was available, the commonest kind of peasant housing was the
cottage built on a frame of timber “crucks”’ (p. 60): ‘there had to be Water driven flourmill, Wairarapa
14
The parallels could be multiplied, but we will content ourselves with a
final one from the area of demography. The rural worlds of both late medieval England and colonial New Zealand were living through the experience
femme
sole, who in that capacity could sue and be sued, and could make valid
business contracts' (p. 45). Colonial conditions similarly strengthened the
position of New Zealand women in comparison with their homeland
sisters.
So New Zealand of the 1880s was being shaped by a curious mix of traditional and modernising influences. Traditional societies are made up of small
communities depending on word-of-mouth, face-to-face communication.
Localism circumscribes both thought and behaviour. Modern societies are
cosmopolitan with a wide range of communication and transport technologies. These encourage extensive commerce and the rise of large urban communities. The ‘village and globe’ pattern of settler New Zealand gave it an
odd, facing-both-ways, traditional/modern stance. In traditional societies
time passes in endless cycles of days, months and seasons; its movement is
repetitive rather than progressive. In modern societies time is a scarce commodity, carefully measured, to be used in a continuous process of innovation. Again, as we have seen, both outlooks were well established in settler
New Zealand. The social structures and politics of traditional societies rely
on ascriptive hierarchy and deference whereas modern societies have a strong
egalitarian flavour and authority is said to derive from the people and operate on their behalf, while social status is functional rather than ascriptive.
Bureaucracies are a modern feature, permitting effective government across
large geographical territories. A good example of a clash between traditional
and modern outlooks is provided by the clash between mayor James Paul,
and stationmaster Bass at 15 belonged to the old order of the hue and cry. Fortunately Oliver Samuel,
the local MP, read the situation more realistically. Bass was not stealing New
Who should exercise political power and who were worthy of public honour and esteem? Many of the answers were provided by democracy which
was flourishing in settler New Zealand. But there were countercurrents which
can be neatly indicated by pointing to certain features of the country's constitution. While the House of Representatives had been elected on a universal male franchise since
The influence of gentry and agrarians was enhanced by two strong rural
myths which the Anglo-Saxon world had bequeathed to the colony, the
‘landed gentry’ myth that was potent in English social and political life, and
the American agrarian myth of the idealised yeoman. English landed society, drawing on a long aristocratic tradition, had shown considerable virility
in weathering the challenges of the French and Industrial Revolutions, capturing the support and loyalty of the rising new classes, the labourers as
‘angels in marble’16, the industrialists and merchants as recruits to the gentlemanly ideal, with country estates and sons at the public schools. A ‘mushroom aristocracy’ quickly established a gentry style use of the open country
of settler New Zealand. Teaming up with the leading merchants and professionals of the towns they formed a significant elite on the English model,
with a pervasive input into the colony's social, political, economic, cultural
and recreational life. Even in bush districts there were plenty of settlers with
a hankering for the reassuring presence of this traditional English style of
leadership, and genuine democrats such as Colonel Robert Trimble of
Inglewood and George Marchant of Stratford were manipulated willy-nilly
into the role of colonial pseudo-squire by popular demand.17
However most smallholders subscribed to agrarian not gentry ideals. By
‘agrarians’ I mean those who looked on yeoman farmers as the moral and
economic backbone of the colony and attributed particular virtues to rural
life. Like Thomas Jefferson, the most notable spokesman for the American
agrarian myth, they believed that ‘those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people’, and that ‘corruption of
morals' has never been the mark of ‘the mass of cultivators’ but rather of
18 In the 1860s the yeoman's prestige had received a great boost
when the American yeoman North crushed the plantation aristocracy of the
South. The development of the myth in the New Zealand context is well
described in 19 Agrarians were natural supporters of the country
quota. A country quota was first formally acknowledged in
There has been a good deal of discussion among New Zealand historians as
to the significance of class consciousness in the shaping of settler society,
and we will not retrace the matter here.20 Class feelings and traditions were
strong in the British hearthland and some carry-over in customs and attitudes was inevitable. However my own reading of the colonial situation in
the mid 1880s is that class had a limited significance as a shaping force in
colonial society, which is not to say that the settlers were not grouped into a
range of different roles in relationship to the means of production. Rather,
it seems that contemporaries felt more at home with the 18th-century way
of analysing society into vertical divisions by source of livelihood than with
a horizontal division by class. Once organised settlement had begun, the
landed interest had quickly elbowed aside the earlier missionary and whaling and sealing interests, ridden out the brief day of glory of the mining
interest and gained a dominance in New Zealand life which it held till well
To my mind, our colonial landed interest falls into five main groups. The squatter ‘gentry’ and the family farm ‘yeomen’ we have already seen. My third group is the cottagers and petty landholders who supplemented wage labour with some subsistence husbandry. Well in tune with the yeoman ideal, they streamed steadily into yeoman farming. I call them peasant labourers or, if they had a craft, peasant tradesmen. My fourth group is the rural service proprietors—carriers, contractors, millers, brewers, innkeepers, storekeepers, blacksmiths and suchlike. They, too, moved readily into yeoman farming. Finally there were station hands and farm labourers, working for wages without aspiring to own home or land.
Most of the colony's urban settlers belonged to what might be termed
the service interest. In the many small towns they worked together in a
fairly egalitarian way, recognising that their centre's success in competition
with its rivals depended on their cooperating for the common good. In the
main centres class groupings, roughly paralleling those of the landed interest, were more in evidence, though even here the lines were blurred by the
various facets of what Claire Toynbee has labelled ‘frontierism’.21 There was,
however, something of an urban gentry, which in Victorian
wealthy landowners, professionals, politicians, managers or proprietors of
substantial businesses, often merchants, senior government officials, ship's
captains, top clergymen and regular army officers.22
As Roberta Nicholls points out, the dividing line for this gentry came just
above shopkeepers.23 Shopkeepers and tradesmen formed a group comparable to the yeomen, with a strong tradition of the small scale family business.
White collar workers were quite numerous in urban New Zealand with its
large export/import and distribution functions. As in 24 In Wellington the largest groups at the lower end of the social scale were the wharf
labourers of the colony's largest port, and the domestic servants.
There can be no doubt about the settler economy's basic capitalism, but it
was a capitalism facing strong counter currents. Capitalist society is characterised by the private ownership of capital and the sale of labour as a commodity, giving it two main classes—capitalists and labourers. Its main mechanisms are the widespread use of monetary values and the dominance of
market forces. The colony's capitalism was undercut by a widespread lack of
separation between ownership and labour, especially among yeomen, shopkeepers and artisans; by personal, non-monetary exchanges of various types;
by colonial developments of the gentry noblesse oblige tradition; and by elements of utopian altruism.
Pioneer conditions and localism both worked towards a socialist serving
of the common good, reminiscent of the medieval manor. A good illustration of this outlook can be found in the small farm associations which the
Stout-Vogel government was fostering in the mid 1880s to settle new country. Each such association consisted of a group formed in an older settled
district to find a suitable piece of new country and settle it. In banding
together, finding their block of land, and planning for their joint occupation of it, the group got to know and trust each other. Individuals who
would never have ‘gone it alone’ as pure, self-seeking capitalists were prepared to attempt backblocks pioneering as members of a ‘band of brothers’
undergirded by a sense of community, and by an awareness that there would
be a pooling of talents and a group commitment to the common good. This
was merely the raising to a higher level of the general ‘village’ outlook of the
colony. In his In Search of the Common Good Charles Erasmus reports on
several decades of study of similar rural communities, drawing on wide field
experience, especially in Latin 25
The benefits of reciprocal altruism which Erasmus found in primitive
peasant communities have parallels in the mutual support, working bees,
and simple road board politics of frontier New Zealand. Erasmus's discussion of exchange labour also has strong New Zealand parallels. He shows
how it works best in small close-knit communities because it requires knowledge of the other person, good communication opportunities to work out
arrangements and mutual responsibilities, and community disapproval of
anyone who cheats on their labour-exchange obligations (p. 50). Erasmus
describes the advantages of labour exchange as ‘the availability of a labour
pool to help meet peak work demands on subsistence farms' (p. 48), the
superiority of exchange labour over hired labour (‘each works for the other
as he would work for himself) (p. 54), and the superiority of working together over working alone, arising from competitiveness, so that ‘while each
man accomplishes competitively no more than he could have accomplished
26 gives varied examples of our settlers' use of exchange labour.
In one sense exchange labour has a strong ‘capitalist’ element, in that it
involves careful ‘keeping of accounts’ of mutual obligations and its object is
to further the productivity of each individual farm enterprise. But there was
much giving and serving in colonial life which was not linked to any careful
bookkeeping. The family enterprise, so common both in country and town,
provided a thorough induction into a regime of all-encompassing mutual
reciprocity. For rural New Zealand it is well documented from the mid 1880s
in the letters to ‘Uncle Ned’ of the children's page of the New Zealand Farmer.
These show the teamwork of the yeoman family manning the farmyard,
garden, dairy, orchard, fields and home, meeting the unpredictability of pioneer life with the predictability of their mutual trust and support, and sharing the fruits of their labours according to their needs. The semi-subsistence
nature of yeoman farming meant that there was an easy extension of this
sharing to the wider community. Frequently a cabbage patch, a farmyard
hatching, a plum tree crop, a hunting expedition, would provide a surplus
for which there was no available market. It took just a little thought and
effort to share the bounty with one's neighbours. The sharing of scarce resources in equipment and skills made equally good sense. As The Gift Relationship,27 there are
circumstances in which the appeal to altruism is superior to the workings of
capitalism, giving a cheaper, more reliable supply of a superior product.
Pioneer yeoman New Zealand provides ample illustrations for his case. But
with the passing of time the subsistence approach gave way to market forces
and, in Erasmus's words ‘brotherhood becomes an otherhood; strangers become quasibrothers, and the high visibility of the small community is replaced by the low visibility of large communities' (p. 46).
At the larger regional and colonial levels it was the gentry who responded to the opportunities to step beyond capitalism and work for the common good. They largely manned regional, civic and national politics, until democracy was strong enough to produce more popular leaders. They founded townships, schools, churches, racecourses and cricket clubs. Even when serving their own capitalist interests the rural gentry were often serving yeoman New Zealand in ways it had neither the means or vision to do for itself. They played a major role in establishing Agricultural and Pastoral shows, in acclimatising livestock and crop varieties, in introducing and adapting new farm implements and machinery, and above all in introducing refrigeration and nurturing it through its difficult pioneer years.
Bush
We will begin our more detailed study of this settler society at its outlying fringes, the bush frontier, looking first at the harvesting of the virgin crop of timber, and then at the creation of new agrarian communities.
We will examine in turn the 1 We
Figure 11.1. The water-based timber industry c.
We are fortunate in our sources for the 2 There are valuable official statistics, particularly the
Kirk repeatedly comments on the ongoing restructuring of the industry from water-based to rail-based mills. Figure 11.1 gives valuable background to our study of the bush settlements of the mid 1880s.
It shows that the water-based industry was situated mainly in districts
such as the Catlins, Banks Peninsula, the Figure 11.2. Timber output for the colonial market,
In Figure 11.2 export totals have been deducted from each province's
output, to give a general view of timber production for the colonial market
in
Figure 11.3 is an overview of this interprovincial timber trade. Overseas
exports for the three provinces significantly involved are also shown. Figures
preceded by a query are estimates only.3 We now survey the milling industry, moving from south to north, roughly following the course of Kirk's
investigation, and drawing on his comments.
In Southland Kirk found an efficient industry of 36 mills. There had
been recent remarkable expansion, the result of branch railways opening up
bush districts, and low freight rates on the main trunk link to Otago and
4 As Otago's output was only about a quarter of Southland's, he found
that ‘Southland practically supplies the markets of the southern portion of
the colony, from
Leaving Figure 11.3 Interprovincial timber trade,
With large supplies of the valued totara, and railway access to Wellington, the Wairarapa timber industry was flourishing. In 1885–86, 20,704 tons
of timber were dispatched from Wairarapa stations and 3,901 from Hutt
Valley stations. Kirk found that Hawke's Bay had drawn most of its timber
from
Sawmilling did not flourish in Taranaki, the most forest-clad of the provinces, mainly because, as Kirk put it ‘the forest is of very indifferent quality’.5
Since good timber was scattered and sparse, labour costs were high. Wages
were low at six to seven shillings per day, as also were royalties at twopence
or threepence per 100 feet. Kirk noted one new and expanding feature of
the Taranaki industry, the conversion of tawa into staves for butter kegs.
The Story of the Kauri, its
business side is surveyed in R.C.J. Stone's Makers of Fortune, and we now
have an excellent essay on the work force in Duncan Mackay's ‘The Orderly
Frontier: The World of the Kauri Bushmen 1860–1925’.6 While the kauri
industry land only a limited interaction with yeoman farming in its immediate vicinity, the timber ships returned with foodstuffs for both the men and
beasts of the workforce, to the benefit of farming in many parts of the colony.
We turn from timber, the colony's main building material, to firewood,
7 A questionnaire he circulated to the Commissioners of Crown Lands
included a query on ‘estimated annual consumption of timber and firewood
by the general public’. The replies were very vague about the firewood, except for that from Taranaki. With only a small area of settled country to
survey, this commissioner should have been able to tap into local knowledge
to get somewhere near the truth. His annual consumption figure was 93,750
tons. With a population of about 7,500 this works out at 12.5 tons per head.
Applied to the whole colony this rate gives an
What we do know is that most of the colony's cooking, heating, and
laundering was fuelled by firewood. Bush settlers were prodigal in the size
of their fireplaces and of the logs they fed them. This economised on labour,
and speeded up the clearing of their land. Colonial industry also used much
firewood. It was a major input for the nearly four thousand tons of wool
scoured in Manawatu Standard advertised
for five cords of good sound matai for its steam engine. Our bush fire story
shows that cutting firewood was one way for a poor settler to get on. Thus
the fires that swept Seaward Bush, Southland, in mid 8 Many humble workers must
have had similar losses that went unrecorded.
Lacking local firewood statistics, we can turn to international comparisons for inspiration. Late 18th-century 9
Michael Williams tells of the prodigious use of firewood in 19th-century
10 Through the century's first three decades the volume of wood
fuel cut was at least sixfold that of lumber and ‘it was not until after 11 If New Zealand of
The bush fires also wrote into the record the humble cutting of posts,
rails, sleepers and telegraph poles, as other ways for poor men to get on.
Both farm improvement and the extension of settlement were leading to
much fencing. Turning 12 In the 1885–86 year the railways used 137,887 sleepers for new
lines and 137,993 in maintenance. Some were Australian hardwood imports,
but 82 per cent of sleepers relaid during the year were of New Zealand timber. Among small producers with losses this summer were Rush of Taonui,
Manawatu. He lost 200 sleepers, produced with the help of one workman
who lost his swag with all he owned except the clothes he had on.13 However, the season's fires were not an unmitigated disaster to the colony's labourers and bush settlers, for the widespread destruction of fencing augmented the demand for posts. In the Hawke's Bay Weekly Courier of 16 April
The forests also provided a non-wood product that proved a boon to
many a struggling settler. This was the fungus Auriculria polytricha, popularly known as ‘Taranaki wool’, which grew on bush logs, and which had
been recognised by Taranaki Chinese immigrant Chew Chong as a plant
prized as a delicacy in
This case study firs the history of the Little River bush settlement into the
larger ‘forest product’ history of the province. 14 Kirk's
15 All told,
16 Banks Peninsula's hillsides continued to provide firewood
long after the sawmillers had finished with them. The Akaroa Mail's shipping columns of E. U. Cameron was a 40-ton ketch that had just unloaded 20,000 feet of
timber from Mail shows the 20-ton ketch
Blackwall sailing for
Despite the deficiency in forest resources, then, access to any available
timber was sought with vigour. The harvesting of Little River's bush illustrates this well. Banks Peninsula's many bays and inlets gave easy sea access
to most of its forests, but not to those of Little River, which thus remained
almost untapped until the 1860s. Then an entrepreneur appeared who saw
17 In 18 As the projected tramway from 19 White's interest in the Rakaia extended beyond bridging it.
He designed and carried through various river control works for the North
Rakaia River Board of Conservators, for which he was paid with land grants.
He thus became a considerable land owner in the area with property on
both sides of the river. Mrs White was an enthusiast for trees, and thousands
of them were planted for shelter and ornament on their Langley estate, three
miles south of Rakaia.20 They must also have planted along the north bank
of the Rakaia. In the fight for the plantations along the riverbank west of
Southbridge on the evening of 21
Gordon Ogilvie's account of Little River in his Banks Peninsula: Cradle
of Canterbury lists a number of White's workmen who later settled on the
land there.22 Among them were several who suffered in the fires of 1885–86,
including John Foley, John and Michael Keenan and James Clark. Another
was James Belcher who migrated north to Stratford to suffer in the fire there.
Other Stratford settlers with links with both Little River and William White
were Noah Walters and his family. Noah was a Little River builder who with
a partner built a bridge over the Okana River for White in Return of
Freeholders 1882 he appears as owning £30 worth of land in 23 He was the first owner of a
block of 250 acres across the Waingongoro River from Francis Walters. Noah
may have followed these sons north after his Little River building business
was burnt down in 24
Little River's timber and firewood must have provided a strong part of
the case for the Lincoln-Little River branch line, opened in
Using our survey of the virgin forest harvest we can now make a preliminary
examination of the usefulness of this ‘town, country, bush and linking railway’ pattern for studying and comparing regions. Figure 11.4 diagrams six
varied examples of the pattern. It will be seen that the Figure 11.4 ‘Town, Country, Bush’—and Railway,
Our last two cases differ more markedly from the Hawke's Bay model. In
contrast to the small Little River example, South
As Figure 11.4 shows, the 25 with timber for all parts of
the colony.
George Marchant's survey of the Stratford fire losses provides a rare chance
to examine in some detail the early days of a yeoman economy in a young
bush settlement. The Stratford settlers had to concentrate on farming their
clearings from the start as the virgin forest harvest had little to offer them.
While there were sawmills at nearby Ngaere and Midhirst, Stratford and its
surrounding rural sections apparently had nothing to tempt the millers. As
regards other forest products, Stratford suffered from the province's domination by forest and from its position at the far reaches of the two small
‘town, country, bush’ patterns.
Figure 11.5 gives a sample of how Marchant listed the losses. His report has the authority of experience behind it, for he had worked his own way up from labourer to successful bush yeoman and respected local leader. As we saw in Chapter 6, it was largely in agreement with T.K. Skinner's report and proved invaluable in the relief committee's deliberations. We will use it to establish the nature of the farm economy the Stratford settlers had been building.
Marchant's entries are brief. In some the losses are individually itemised,
in others grouped together. Fortunately he provides a short discussion of
how he went about his task. He valued pasture at £1 an acre, grass seed at £2
Figure 11.5. Sample extracts, George Marchant's report (Source:
Hawera Star, 18 January
We will examine the rural economy first. The most universal rural loss
was clearly pasture. If we put pasture and seed grass together, 41 of the 48
rural settlers had grass crop losses. For 16 of these settlers the grass crop can
be separated out; Marchant puts it at £793 out of their total loss of £1,001.
We can safely say that grass was the main feature in the husbandry of these
settlers, that they had all had some grass at risk, and that it must have represented over half of their total losses as estimated by Marchant. This is not
surprising, for this was a young bush settlement and grass was of necessity
the first crop. What is surprising is that there had been 11 losses of crops and
Once his first grass got away the settler had to decide what he would do
with it. The options were pasture and hay for stock or shutting it up for
grass seed; many settlers were trying both. In either case some kind offence
was needed, either to keep stock in or to keep it out. A short term solution,
and one which helped with clearing the land, was the unsightly log fence.
The figures show that a good proportion of the settlers had moved on to
wire fences. In his report Marchant remarked that shutting up grass for a
seed harvest was ‘always more or less a speculation’ at risk from fire and
water. Some of the Stratford experience in handling this seed harvest had
been brought from Banks Peninsula, the Mecca of the colonial cocksfoot
Return of
Freeholders, and correspondence from descendants held in the Turnbull Library,26 to have been the son of a Little River pioneer. Pilcher Ralfe's wife
was from Banks Peninsula and a daughter was born at Wainui about 27
Others of their neighbours may also have been from the Peninsula. William
Johnson, who is reported to have come to the Cardiff district with Ralfe and
to have been his kinsman, may be one. John Sharrock, first owner of 122
acres neighbouring Joseph Belcher on Waingongoro Road, is something of
a puzzle. He must certainly be the John Sherrocks, settler, Little River, with
122 acres in Taranaki Herald of Herald's man was wrong about the
house, but Sharrock was developing his rural property while living in the
whare in the township, where he could get labouring work to help with
straitened finances. He had moved up to the farm by 28 Of the Cardiff settlers who can be definitely linked with
Banks Peninsula, five lost seed grass in the fire, of a total value of £119.
Those who decided to use their grass for grazing had to choose between
dairying and beef, and face the expense of buying stock. Dairying at this
stage meant home production of butter, and hence the building and equipping of a dairy. It also usually required pigs and a sty to handle the skim
milk by-product. It was a long trail from the Stratford bush clearings to any
substantial market for butter, beef and bacon. But when planning ahead
during Hawara Star of 22 july reported that 1,973 cattle had been shipped out from
Waitara between 1 April and 17 July. In June a freezing works opened at
Waitara, and by the spring it was in the market not only for beef but also for
butter. In the past the storekeepers had handled the butter trade, buying
both for the local market and for export to such places as 29 This will have nudged the Stratford settlers towards extending their grazing pastures in the months before the fires. Others will have
been sceptical and, in the short term, right, for the Waitara freezing venture
collapsed before two years were up.
From Figure 11.6 it can be seen that dairying was a significant but not a
predominant feature in the district's economy. Marchant was not particularly careful in his use of the terms ‘cow’ and ‘cattle’. Some of the cattle in
his list were probably milch cows (e.g. William Harre's, John Kirkpatrick's
and Matthew Moore's). Probably the best indication of a significant dairy
herd is the presence of pigs. Cows were good at fending for themselves in a
bush fire, and many of them escaped into the bush. The dairy is likely to
have been near the house, and defended with only a little less rigour than
the home itself. So the losses of cows and dairies probably understate the
importance of dairying. But the pigsty is likely to have been at a distance
from the home, and it and the helpless pigs inside were very much at risk.
Of the 9 rural settlers who lost pigs 5 were definitely dairying, and another,
Harre, lost 5 cattle. It is highly probable that all 9 had dairy herds. It is of
interest that 6 of the 9 were on Pembroke Road. These were among the
district's earliest settlers as the Pembroke Road sections were sold ahead of
Stratford township. They had had the time to get the pasture, and find the
money for stock and equipment, for sizable herds. It was to such folk that
Marchant referred in discussing the implications of pasture loss, ‘a settler
milking from 12 to 20 cows, and making from £2 to £4 a week from butter,
besides rearing calves and pigs'. Marchant explained that such a man suddenly found himself with no income and a mass of problems.30
But the settlers had other things in mind besides grass. The fire losses
probably understate their commitment to crops, orchards and gardens, which
were not as flammable as pigsties and dry grass. Those that were lost must
have been scorched from nearby log fences and burning bush. Unfortunately Marchant names the crop for only 3 of the 11 losses. One was green
oats, the other two potatoes. We do have a little evidence apart from these
fire losses. In the Budget of Hawera Star of 27 October
Hawera
Star of Taranaki Herald( Hawera Star repeatedly comments on the large amount of fruit grown in
his district. In the 31 The Stratford settlers, it seems, were still keeping most of their
options open in
Marchant's report also tells us a little about the rural settlers' homes. Of
the 10 homes lost 4 are listed as ‘whares’; these were probably simple one- or
two-roomed structures of split timber. At the other end of the scale was
Matthew Moore's ‘Four-roomed house, with passage’ insured for £100. This
insurance is unusual for a bush district, but probably the insurance company had decided that an iron-roofed house in Stratford's wet climate was
an acceptable risk. One other house was insured, that of Clement Saunders,
reported by Marchant as ‘House burnt, insured £30’, but more fully described by a visiting correspondent of the Taranaki Herald (14) Colonists' Guide of 32 This began as a two-roomed, shingle-roofed
cottage costed at £61 is 4d, with two back rooms to be added as a lean-to as
required, at a cost of £21 14s 7d. It could be further improved with a verandah costing £9 19s 3d.
Finally we must see what Marchant's report tells about Stratford township. The losses have a very rural look, which is not surprising for this large,
Figure 11.6.
Brett's Colonists' Guide and
Cyclopaedia of Useful Knowledge, Return of Freeholders 1882 as a labourer at Inglewood
with £13 worth of land at Stratford, and in the
A rather larger group seem to have been folk who saw their township life
as a preliminary to going farming. William Baird, who lost beehives, crop,
pigs and sty, appears in the
Was Stratford's diverse semi-subsistence farm economy a reflection of the general aims of the colony's bush yeomen? Or did it merely represent an early stage of bush settlement? Or perhaps the consequences of a lack of millable timber and remoteness from markets? By broadening our horizons we will show that Stratford's settlers were working to a pattern which the majority of bush yeomen had in mind in 1885–86. And we will then look for the sources from which they drew it. We turn first to a more fully developed farm in an older Taranaki bush settlement.
The Taranaki Herald of
The agricultural journalism of the time shows that what the Stratford
settlers were setting out to create, and what Poplar Farm had in a large
measure achieved, were in line with colonial expectations for bush yeoman
farms. In New Zealand Industrial Gazette of New Zealand Farmer of 33 A New Zealand Farmer correspondent passing through in 34
It seems that a monoculture of grass for dairying and frozen meat only really
began to grip the bush settler mind in the last years of the century.
For the origins of the yeoman ideal which was being adapted to the New
Zealand bush we have to go back to the long past of 35
Both colonial bush yeoman and English peasant farmer would probably have seen something of themselves in a contemporary English writer's nostalgic description of his impression of the 15th-century yeoman:
The necessaries of life were cheap and plentiful, the habits of life were simple;
all the members of a yeoman's family were labourers on the farm; the women
milked the cows, span the wool, and made up the garments; almost every
article consumed was of home manufacture.35
But the experience of the founding years of a New Zealand bush settlement would have been more medieval in flavour than that of contemporary
English family farms. Like the medieval peasant, the bush yeoman depended
mainly on his own muscles, with minimal assistance from draught animals,
the wheel, or technology more advanced than the spade, axe or sickle. Among
the logs, roots and stumps of a new bush clearing, draught animals were of
little use. In any case, as with the medieval peasant, it was a question of
affording them. For draught animals competed with the struggling settler for
the clearing's limited food and cash crop resources. So it was back to
hand labour, with pick, adze and hoe; spade rather than plough, sickle rather
than the more advanced scythe. The first home was commonly a ponga
whare, followed shortly by a split timber one, both ‘home made’, furnished
and fuelled from materials hacked from the section. The first working animals were likely to be riding horses; the Stratford fire losses seem to indicate
these rather than draught horses. But draught animals must have been about
Of course this ‘medievalism’ in bush life and work derived largely from settler poverty and the particular conditions of a new bush clearing. It would become much less marked as the farm matured and prospered. But even those, and there were some, who took considerable capital to a bush section, had to start with primitive technology. Since contract bush felling was becoming very competitive by the mid 1880s, they had the choice of speeding up the felling, logging up and stumping, to achieve an earlier breakthrough to a more modern farm technology. For several decades from the early 1870s, when extensive bush settlement began, widespread primitive, semi-subsistence hand-tool, peasant farming coexisted beside modern bureaucratic railway and telegraph systems and modern capitalistic sawmills and newspapers. Many who settled the bush may have set out with rustic dreams owing much to the peasant past. But they did so in the context of draught animal technology on the bush tramways, of steam technology on rail and in mill, of modern communication systems to bring them ample information about the promises of the coming of refrigeration. By the mid 1880s more modern visions were beginning to undermine the traditional rustic dreams
In 19th-century England it was the yeoman's ‘medieval’ aspects that accounted for his low esteem. When compared with the tenant farmer he was
given a bad name by contemporaries who believed that ‘with his ignorance,
traditional outlook and lack of capital’ he was ‘always a bad farmer’.37 How
justified this criticism was is not our concern, but we can say that it has little
relevance to the New Zealand yeoman. Partly this was because the benefits
which the English drew from the improving landlord/innovative tenant relationship were mediated by a variety of different relationships in the colony.
We have already seen how the gentry served as midwives in the rise of the
yeomen, but there were also other important providers of agricultural leadership in the bush districts, several of which we can illustrate from our Stratford and Inglewood examples. The Crown Land ranger often became a friend
and mentor of the settlers. Such a man was G.F. Robinson, who watched
over Inglewood and Stratford from their foundations and was described in
38
The stock and station agent was another important source of farming advice and information, and an introducer of agricultural innovations. Newton King, who sent his stockman to help round up the Stratford cattle who
had ‘gone bush’ in the great fire, was certainly such a man. On his death in
39 Mentors just beginning to appear
in the mid 1880s were the dairy factory managers and government advisers
on dairying. There was self help too. In Inglewood of the 1880s there were
regular meetings of the Moa Farmers Club.40 If they knew what they were
about, the yeoman and his family team had one great advantage over other
labour arrangements. This was the constant personal supervision which they
commonly gave to their crops and their stock.
‘I want a wife who can bear a hand on the cross-cut saw, look after the
house, milk the cows, and pick fungus' the Egmont Star's Kaupokonui correspondent was told by one of the local bush settler bachelors. The correspondent, writing in 41 The following month John Finlay, the Hawera Star's
correspondent at Manutahi in the open country, decided to visit an old
acquaintance who had settled in the bush, to see what life was like there. His
friend, John Bentley, had left a clerk's job in the office of his father's Yorkshire weaving business, and was now breaking in a section on Skeet Road
with the help of the wife he had married sixteen months previously. Bentley
seems to have found a wife in line with bush settler specifications. Arriving
late Finlay found the Bentleys about to retire for the night.
The fire was raked, for in the bush the fire is never allowed to go out. Mrs B.
soon had the ghreen shaugh (red embers) pulled to the front, and several
large logs put on, of which there is an abundant supply close to the back
door.42
Finlay found that Bentley was weaning calves from a number of young cows and breaking them to the bail. Timber for a dairy was stacked awaiting a carpenter. In the afternoon of the next day, Sunday, a number of the district's men and women settlers called on the Bentleys. ‘The gentlemen talked of bushfelling, grass, beef, and fungus; while the ladies were dead on butter, cheese and children.’ No doubt Mrs Bentley received plenty of experienced advice about the care of the third member of her household, the ‘little olive branch which was its mother's pride and father's joy’, and about churns and skimming pans, for the planned dairy would doubtless be given into her charge.
We have too few such glimpses into the life of the bush settler's wife.
Those we do have are strongly reminiscent of small farm households in
other times and places. Mrs Bentley's stirring up of the embers of ‘the fire
that is never allowed to go out’ puts one in mind of the Irish peasant tradition found by Arensberg and Kimball in the laggard world of rural Ireland
in 43 For some years Mrs Bentley's day must have followed a similar path,
until the appearance of the dairy factory removed dairy work (though not
the milking shed) from the realm of women to that of men.
By the late 18th-century the women of
Traditionally, there had been a rough division of labor on the farm by sex.
Women did dairying; men raised grain and livestock. But women also had a
wide range of other tasks. They serviced, trained, and raised their children.
They also sold their surplus production on the market and seasonally and
during emergencies helped the men with their tasks.44
Many farms had what might be called a dual household economy. The
woman used the income from her sales to finance the purchase of household
items. The man used the income from his sales to expand the capital investment in land and equipment.45
For The Book of
New Zealand Women.46
We turn now to the bush children. They too were part of the family
team, contributing to the farm economy from an early age. Thus one of the
mothers whom Finlay met at Bentley's that Sunday afternoon in
Children swarm, and blessed are they who have their quiver full of them, for
they all help on the farm, or go out to work for wages at an early age. Those
farmers are the most comfortably off indeed, who have a stout wife and a
growing family of boys and girls to look after the cattle and the dairy and
take produce, whatever it may be, to market.47
Here again we have patterns that reflect those of the other side of the globe.
In the yeoman households of the American northern states ‘the corporate
farm economy bound its members seamlessly together in the process of
working out their mutual subsistence’.48 In peasant Ireland of 49 Letters from bush children printed in the ‘Children's Post Office’ of the New Zealand Farmer from late
The actions of several Stratford boys in the emergency of the great fire
demonstrate something of the maturity and involvement which this way of
life created. One newspaper reporter learnt of a lad of about ten whose
father was away at work. He first got his mother and the other children into
a large potato pit out of reach of the flames, and then busied himself saving
the home, being temporarily blinded in doing so.50 On the borders of Stratford, as he entered in quest of help for the refugees he had left on East Road,
Thomas Skinner came upon a house that was just catching fire and set to
work to help its only occupant, a young lad, to put out the fire with buckets
of water. His mother and the younger children had fled to the station, but
the boy insisted on staying behind and keeping watch over the house.51 We
have already seen how Joseph Richardson's ten-year-old son fought a successful lone battle to save their home on Opunake Road.52 I have shown
elsewhere that settler girls were equally mature and resourceful.53
Mick 54 In England and elsewhere forest land had often been the resort of
the destitute. Fernand Braudel remarks on a typical French ordinance of
55 In 19th-century
England, villagers living near forest land benefited from legal and illegal use
of its resources, drawing on it for game, firewood, timber, and grazing for
their animals.56 The unoccupied forests of colonial New Zealand had far
greater resources, and not surprisingly the settlers drew on them liberally,
again both legally and illegally. I have documented elsewhere the copious
supplies of meat drawn from the bush in the 1870s.57 I will here give a few
1885–86 reports to show that the bounty was still there. In the Hawke's Bay
Weekly Courier of Feilding Star reported an
enormous slaughter of wild pigeons in that district.58 Parties passing through
the bush to ascend the southern slopes of Mount Taranaki in April and June
both bagged some of the large number of pigeons they came across on the
way.59 The April party reported hearing wild cattle throughout their journey.
These and wild pigs offered settlers a more substantial resource than the
pigeons. In May surveyors preparing a Hawke's Bay bush block for a special
settlement association found that wild cattle, pigs and pigeons were all plentiful. The Yeoman of 60 A Feilding Star editorial of 1 November Star was concerned for folk who had
been ‘Victims … of wholesale robbery for the last four or five years’ in
consequence of persons who thought that they could ‘enter upon private
lands and cut timber for their own use for purposes of sale, to make a profitable living, without in any way asking permission’. Unoccupied bush could
also be used as supplementary grazing. This seems to be what Cardiff Road
settler William Johnson did after the Stratford fire. With all his pasture ‘as
black as a beaver hat’ he was sending his 20 cows two miles away each day
for feed in an open place through the bush. The ‘long acre’—the use of
roadsides as grazing—was another common expedient. Drovers taking mobs
of cattle through the bush were frustrated by this practice as the local cattle
often led the passing stock up their familiar tracks off the road.61 In townships in and near the bush large-scale farming of the ‘long acre’ became a
community problem. In 62 another a
63 The roadside crop of grass seed was another resource which sometimes caused problems.64 There were contemporary English parallels to these uses of land for which no right of common existed.65
In Evening Post of
Along this road a chain of settlements was formed, little villages each with its cluster of outlying farms, and with roads leading away into the dense bush. Now the railway passes along the Mountain Road, and countless streams are bridged, but a few years ago … one might see men plunging through mud knee-deep (and even waist-deep) for miles; women with their babies on their backs fording the streams and crossing the rivers on trees felled that the branches might reach the opposite side…. There the first settlers, whether Briton or Dane, emulated each other in a struggle of dire economy and stubborn endurance, getting enough perhaps from the grass seed grown on the rich ashes of their first burn to keep life and soul together against another winter of reeking moisture and mud. The children gathered the edible fungus from the felled logs … that those few pence might help. The women worked side-by-side with the men from dawn to dark in the work of ‘logging up’ the charred and smutty timber, and hewing out the massy stumps. Little by little, year by year, their reward became visible; a cow was bought, poultry increased, a better roof was over their heads; schoolhouses began to be built near improved roads … Their fight with water ended in triumph. This year they have met a new and more insatiate foe—unsparing fire. The earnings of years, the result of heroic self denial, the fruit of their patient courage, lies in ashes, and they must commence life anew.
Country
Before we discuss the open country settlers we must clarify some of our
terms. The dominant figure of the 19th-century occupation of the open
country was the ‘squatter’. This term reminds us of the Australian origins of
the pastoral industry but as, unlike their Australian mentors, few of New
Zealand's pastoralists helped themselves to unoccupied country by ‘squatting’ on it, we will prefer the term ‘runholder’. The runholders have had
more than their fair share of attention both from contemporaries and from
historians, so we will treat them more briefly than we have the less well
recorded bush settlers. A Southern Gentry1 is a full
and lively treatment of the rise of the runholders, their assumption of an
elite role, and their enjoyment of an affluent lifestyle, in their main strongholds of the 2 and call them ‘feldon
yeomen’. We will examine the interaction of these feldon yeomen with the
runholders, and of both with the bush settlements and the towns.
The fires of the 1885–86 summer served to highlight the twofold nature of
open country settlement as either runholders' country or yeomen's country.
When fire got loose on the runholders' broad acres it had usually to be left to
burn itself out, the available manpower being only sufficient to defend such
key assets as homesteads and shearing sheds. The several fires which ‘swept
off the grass' in the Wairarapa ‘in thorough Australian style’3 seem all to have
burned until halted by natural obstacles or a change in the weather. Similarly there seems to have been no significant human intervention with the
4 In Hawke's Bay Alexander Grant would
apparently have had little hope of containing the Burnside blaze