Let us imagine a bird's eye view of our district and its regional context, looking northwards from high above the coast south of Manaia on a fine morning at the beginning of the decade, just before settlers began to cross the Waingongoro. We find a cross-hatch pattern on the land's surface resulting from east-west signs of human endeavour intersecting with strong geological north-south lines. The most prominent of these geological lines is that created down the millennia by the southward march of volcanic activity from the ancient sugar loaves at New Plymouth via the eroded peaks of Kaitakei and Pouakai to the recent mighty volcanic dome of Taranaki-Egmont, with its southwards extension of Fantham's Peak. Of more immediate consequence to the daily lives of the coming settlers are the many small rivers rushing down goiges cut into the southern slopes of Egmont, burbling quickly in shallow courses across the Waimate Plains, and joining as they go to form stronger streams that have cut rather deep valleys into the coastal cliffs.

Cross-hatching across this raking of riverbeds are three clear lines resulting from human endeavour. The strongest and oldest of these, following the bush line that parallels the coast roughly 12 kilometres inland, is a string of Maori villages with associated sheltered clearings for their crops. To the north, a little below where the plain gives way to the mountain's slopes, is ‘Hursthouse's Line’, a pack track cut through from Stratford to Opunake by the surveyors as an early strategic move in the government's plans to occupy the plains. Much more substantial than this track is the third east-west line, the South Road across the open country paralleling the coast. Opened in 1871, it has become a coach road along which the government, with the assistance of the Maori chief Hone Pihama, has for years been sending its mails from New Plymouth to Hawera. It has recently been further upgraded in preparation for the coming of the settlers. Looking more carefully at the great stretch of bush, of which the Kaponga settlers will occupy the central portion, we see other lines, both cast-west and north-south, cut by the surveyors both to facilitate their work and to form the primitive beginnings of settlement roads.

The colony had just experienced two decades of massive immigration. The 1860s gold rushes had doubled the population and the 1870s ‘Vogel’ immigration drive had practically doubled it again. So the country was full of relative newcomers, for whom one great attraction had been the promise of easy access to land. In moving to meet this land hunger the government had, particularly since the early 1870s, produced a flurry of maps. We will glance through these maps, and other contemporary sources of information, to see what they had been telling the folk who moved to become Kaponga settlers.

From the late 1860s Taranaki maps tended to carry two strong-messages. They demonstrated the government's concern to open up routeways through the province, and by sketching in the bush line they emphasised the large areas of the bush land, attractive to the more impecunious settler. They told South Islanders of a frontier rich in opportunities for both wage labour and access to reasonably priced land, a message increasingly pertinent in the later 1870s as the alluvial gold fields continued to peter out, and the Vogel development projects, pursued most vigorously in the south, came to an end. So a moderate flow of migration developed from the south, to the railway works moving south from New Plymouth and north from Wanganui and to the land they were opening up.

As depression developed in the late 1870s the government slashed its development projects, except in Taranaki, where it discerned the best opportunities of maintaining land sales income and meeting the land hunger. Its decision to occupy the Walmate Plains and challenge Te Whiti of Parihaka led to accelerating work on the Taranaki railway and the sending of the surveyors onto the plains, which in turn focused the colony's attention on this district as the current prime frontier of opportunity. The first survey parties crossed the Waingongoro on 29 July 1878 and by 17 August the Wanganui Herald's Hawera correspondent was writing that ‘numbers of capitalists from Canterbury and Otago are looking over this district with a view of being purchasers’.

Our main concern is not of course with these capitalists, whose real interest will have been in the coastal open country. Evidence of strong working-class interest is provided by the shortlived activities of the Waimate Plains Co-operative Land Company, which flourished among Christchurch labourers for a few months from late 1879, as a response to rising unemployment. Its offer to take over the plains from the government included an undertaking to settle 8000 souls in the area, to assume responsibility for its defence, and to do all the necessary public works.1 The government rebuffed the land company but its publicity may well have started the process that took several of our Kaponga pioneers to their bush sections. As they mulled over this and other publicity, many potential working-class immigrants will have been weighing up the opportunities against the dangers of the Maori threat. Mainly comparatively recent arrivals in the colony, with a limited knowledge of its history and commonly with a complete ignorance of the existence of a Treaty of Waitangi, they will probably have seen the government's plans mainly as a further step in the inevitable advance of western civilisation, for the ultimate benefit of all concerned. Any among them wanting light on Maori grievances and the government's proposals to meet them may have been helped by the maps drawn for the West Coast Commission, set up in January 1880 to look into the matter. These showed that the Maori villages were associated with the bush line, and that it was proposed to create a ‘Continuous Reserve’ of Maori land, embracing these villages in a strip consisting of both open country and bush. Land was also to be set aside for the two prominent south Taranaki chiefs who had been working for peaceful coexistence with the Pakeha, Manaia and Hone Pihama, and their people.

The most important publicity enlightening Kaponga's coming settlers and the most significant maps helping them envisage the lie of the land arose from the work of the surveyors and the government's advertising of its results. The main land sales, extending from October 1880 to September 1882, were given massive publicity. ‘I never saw land, either at Home or anywhere else, more extensively advertised,’ Edward Godsal, an Otakeho settler, told a parliamentary committee in 1887.2 The main sales were repeatedly advertised in the New Zealand Gazette, with the advice that lithographed plans were to be seen at any land office in the colony. To reach ordinary citizens the government also advertised extensively in the press, and sent copies of its ‘colored lithographic plans’ to the newspaper offices.3 ‘We have received a plan of the sections on the Waimate Plains, shortly to be offered for sale by auction, and anyone wishing to inspect the plan can see it by calling at our office,’ the Hawke's Bay Weekly Courier of 24 September 1880 advised at the beginning of an editorial on the topic. Besides such editorials the colony's press carried news items on the sales, and Hawera land agent Thomas Foy advertised in the Star that he was available ‘to execute COMMISSIONS for intending PURCHASERS unable to attend the sale’.

In its report for the year ended 31 March 1883 the Crown Lands Department looked back on its campaign with satisfaction:

The settlement of the Waimate Plains is a good illustration of the advantages of first preparing the country by opening of roads through it, and then offering it for selection in sections on the settlement conditions of deferred payment, residence, and cultivation, alternating with sections obtainable on immediate payments. In October, 188[0], the first block of 8,500 acres was opened for sale; about one-third of the intervening sections were on deferred payment; a few days after they were allotted the remaining sections were offered for cash. Every few months since block after block has been submitted for selection and sale on the same principle, and up to 31st March last 360 sections, of an area of 24,328 acres, has been sold on deferred payment … For cash there has been sold an area of 46,954 acres …; of town and suburban lands, 526 acres …; or a total of 71,808 acres … It is worthy of note that of the 360 selectors on deferred payment only eleven have forfeited … The roading of the land has been kept in advance of the sales … 4

The report then gave statistics on the progress of settlement provided by Crown Lands Ranger G.F. Robinson. The rural settlers had erected 122 dwellings for their population of 650. There were a further 460 people in Manaia township and the village settlements of Okaiawa and Otakeho, with 94 dwellings and 30 commercial and public buildings. Also:

An area of 17,500 acres has been fenced into paddocks, and upwards of 5,000 acres of the bush behind the Continuous Reserve felled and grassed. In travelling over the Waimate Plains and seeing the numerous homesteads which enliven the view, the clumps of young trees already showing up at a few of the homesteads, the numerous enclosures, the cattle and the sheep, the flour mill at Manaia, and the wonderful progress of that place, the intersection of the back bush by a complete network of cleared road-lines, and settlers' clearings in progress everywhere through it, one can scarcely realize that only some two years ago there was none of this, and where these beautiful farms, the pride of their possessors, now add improvement to improvement day by day the wild pig roamed by the hundred in undisputed possession.5

Let us now move back and see all this from the viewpoint of the Kaponga pioneers' developing understanding of their new world. The earlier land sales were dominated by open-country land, which was avidly snapped up. The bush sections were surveyed a little later, put forward more slowly, and less keenly sought after. So the bush pioneers were aware that they were moving in to begin the last of three bands of settlement between the coast and the mountain. Along the coast were the more affluent settlers making rapid progress on their new farms, next came the Continuous Reserve with its string of Maori villages, and beyond this up to the foot of the mountain were their own reaches of bush. They will have come to their purchase with a knowledge of Taranaki that varied from a few days to many years, but even for the Taranaki-born this land had till recently lain beyond the pale. The first worthwhile information on the farming potential of this land will have been that gained by the surveyors and will have reached the public in various ways, formal and informal, as surveying and sales proceeded. We are therefore fortunate that in his Reminiscences of a Taranaki Surveyor W.H. Skinner records the work over a significant portion of our district. Under the heading ‘Virgin Country of Great Promise’ he describes his work over 1881–82, first laying off the land west of the Waingongoro River, as far as Hastings Road, and then (pp. 49–50):

from the Skeet road to Mt Egmont Reserve, including also the area on the upper Manaia road between the Rowan and Palmer roads to the Forest Reserve. This was the most promising area of forest country that I had encountered in Taranaki … This was also a pleasant district to work in. It was easy country to lay down traverse lines, and for swagging; mobs of wild cattle in good condition were plentiful and provided us with ample fresh meat; and other supplies were readily obtained via the Mountain road. Taking it all in all, it was the most satisfactory bush country survey we experienced in Taranaki.

Many of our pioneers will have found the newspapers a great help in picturing their new world. The Taranaki Herald (19/11/80) carried a particularly useful contribution for intending purchasers by ‘Traveller’, an anonymous north Taranaki writer who had inspected the district while choosing a section on which to settle himself. Our bush settlers would have been encouraged by his opinion that ‘altogether I believe the bush district behind Waimate will be more valuable in the future than the open part’. He was, though, impressed with the quality of the land over the greater part of the plains, but commented on the south-east and west winds ‘which sweep over the plains in a pitiless bitter manner’. From the Waingongoro as far as Oeo he found the land covered with fern and tutu, with patches of clover all through the fern, some of them nearly 50 acres in extent. Up towards the Continuous Reserve he found large areas of clean cocksfoot from which the Maori had harvested a good amount of seed in past years. Beyond Oeo, and particularly towards Opunake, he found a marked change in soil and vegetation, with the soil becoming more sandy and gravelly, and, unlike on the stretch from Oeo to Hawera, large areas of flax. Around Opunake, he reported, ‘the surface soil rests on a strata of—what is called there—iron-stone, a reddish, rusty-looking stone, which turns up in large blocks and lumps’. What he was noticing here were differences arising from the district's volcanic past. As we will see, this past had also left significant differences within the Kaponga district. Our settlers will have been most concerned with his comments on the bush:

The greater portion of the bush land is lightly timbered, so much so that most of the sawn timber and fencing for Waimate must come from the bush along the Mountain Road … But for bush settlers, who prefer making their living by clearing and cultivating their land, to using the timber upon it, I fancy the bush land behind Waimate will exactly suit them, as the bush generally is very open, the wild cattle and pigs having destroyed a large portion of the undergrowth…. The trees generally are small, if we except the ratas and mahoes … Pines are few and far between, there being little more than enough for the settlers' own wants in the way of building materials and fencing…. Altogether, I think the man with only a small capital would do much better on the Waimate bush land than on the Waimate open land, as he would easily clear his land, and would have firewood, fencing, and shelter whilst doing so. He could also fill up his spare time (and his larder) by having an occasional hunt after wild cattle and pigs, both of which are in great abundance.

‘Traveller’ was not impressed with Hursthouse's Line (i.e. Opunake Road), which he thought ‘will probably be the main inland road for the bush settlers on a larger portion of this district’. As yet it was ‘of a very temporary nature, being only sufficient to answer as a pack track to supply survey parties, &c’. He found that it rose rapidly from Stratford to the Waingongoro River, after which it continued at about the same level for several miles. It was cleared about 15 feet wide, wound about in the most perplexing manner, and crossed the many gullies and streams on temporary bridges of fern-tree and saplings, bridges just wide enough for a packhorse. Nor did he have high hopes for the place it led to—Opunake—or think much of its prospects as a port. When the wind blew from the south-east or the south-west the bay became ‘one extent of broken water, and utterly unsafe for any vessel to enter or stay there’.

‘Traveller’ was in effect making a survey in space on which to base predictions for the coming years in time. He was right about some things. The bush sections were certainly to prove a fine investment for many a man of small means, largely for the reasons he gave. Opunake certainly was to prove a poor bet as a port. On other matters he was partly right. The timber harvest of these stretches of bush was certainly to be a limited one, but it proved much better than his estimate. Clearing the bush was not unduly difficult, but it proved a harder task and took longer to complete than one would infer from either his comments or those in the government's optimistic advertising. On some matters he was quite astray. He misread the government's intentions for the Continuous Reserve, seeing it as ‘compelling future settlers on the bush land … to travel through a belt of bush about two miles wide before reaching their land’. In fact the reserve was not really to be ‘continuous’ at all, but was broken up by stretches sold to settlers, and from 1883 on even much that remained as ‘native land’ passed into settler hands on long-term leases. His assumption that Hursthouse's Line would be the main inland road for a large portion of the bush was also to prove quite wrong.

Had we taken a bird's eye view of the Kaponga district on a fine day each autumn throughout the decade the most striking change we would have observed would have been the shifting balance of clearings and wild. The patterns and speed of this change were a result of a complex interplay of forces. We must examine the inflow of settlers, looking both at government handling of land sales and buyer responses. We must see how these settlers' clearing activities were shaped both by land settlement regulations and the effects of changing labour and commodities markets. We must look at the seasons, especially at how their diversity of weather directly affected bush-felling and burning, and indirectly the demand for bush land. Throughout we seek the larger overview, leaving individual fortunes to our next chapter.

The first Waimate Plains bush sections were offered at the sale of 28 February 1881. Most lay just outside our Kaponga District but several were on lower Palmer and Manaia roads and passed into the hands of Kaponga pioneers, mainly on deferred payment (DP). The DP system was designed to get genuine settlers of limited means onto the land, on terms of small deposits followed by payments over a period of years. To deter speculators the system required residence on, and development of, the sections. If more than one applicant applied for a section it went to auction. Reflecting on the sale, in the context of earlier sales along the Mountain Road, the Star (2/3/81) concluded that:

The lesson taught by the recent sales … seems to be that bush land will sell for deferred but not for immediate payments…. In respect of the Waimate bush land, the arguments in favour of forcing on settlement as much as possible are incontestable; the public exchequer will gain … If land be offered at once, the newly cut road and survey lines will not need to be recut …

The pattern of the offering of the bush sections was that the first put up were to the south and east between Matapu and Kapuni, along Skeet Road and the lower reaches of its side-roads. The offerings then moved steadily westwards and northwards. The 3 October 1881 sale put a number of further settlers up lower Palmer Road and along Eltham Road to the north of them. The 22 December 1881 sale put three more settlers on Manaia Road. There were also about half a dozen cash buyers of sections further west along lower Rowan and Mangawhero roads, but this land does not seem to have been occupied for some years. ‘Kaponga Village Settlement’, and a number of adjoining rural sections, were finally put up at the large sale of 8 September 1882 that ended the series, together with a good deal of rural and village land elsewhere across the plains. When these folk took up their land there was a sprinkle of settlers across the eastern half of the Kaponga District. But although the government had felled the township sites along the Mountain Road, it did not do so for Kaponga. The few folk who purchased township sections were quite unable to establish the place as the district's centre. As the colony faced harder times the forward march of settlement began to falter. In 1882 the government amended the land laws, particularly to make bush settlement easier. A perpetual-lease tenure was introduced and residential requirements were made less stringent to allow settlers greater freedom to earn the money needed to develop their properties. But in the Taranaki bush of the early 1880s it was not the land laws that were the greatest discouragement to settlement but the weather.

Those few Kaponga pioneers who began their first clearings for the burns of the summer of 1881–82 would have shared the general experience described in a Star editorial of 17 May 1882:

We hear that a petition is likely to be forwarded to the Minister for Lands by a number of bush settlers between here and Inglewood … Hardly any of those who felled bush on their land last season have been able to burn it off. Those who tried, and ‘singed’ the leaves and light twigs off the timber, are inclined to regret that they ever set light to it.

The 1882 winter would have seen the first significant amount of felling in the Kaponga District. Bush burn fortunes were patchy. The weather was favourable early in the summer, and the Star of 7 February 1883 reported many settlers in the Manaia bush having good burns, but on 10 March, after a survey along these bush roads, it found that ‘as a rule the burns have not been good’. In reporting on the district's roadworks for the 1882–83 season, Crown Lands Ranger G.F. Robinson gave as one reason for their lagging ‘the unusually wet season we have had since January last’.6

But the worst was yet to come. The 1883 winter saw a massive assault on the bush, with the Star of 11 October reporting an estimate that ‘from 400 to 500 men are now employed bushfelling in the bush between Okaiawa and Otakeho’. They were working in atrocious weather. Some months later, in accounting for the delays in the surveys required for his work as West Coast Commissioner, William Fox explained that the season had seen ‘the prevalence of the wettest winter weather ever remembered in the colony’. Influenced by the experience that ‘last year the early burns were the good ones' the settlers got most of the felling completed by mid-October.8 It did not pay off. In the Star of 17 January 1884 the ‘Kaupokonui’ ‘Our Own’ reported that:

One or two attempts have been made by the over-anxious ones to burn off the bush during the week. The high winds forced the fires through pretty well, yet, from the amount of timber still remaining on the ground, the venture proves to have been anything but a success.

Not till mid-February did the weather briefly raise the settlers' hopes. A survey of the situation at that point was provided by ‘Y’ in his Star ‘Farmers' Column’ of 21 February 1884:

The past week has done much towards drying up the felled bush … I have not yet heard of any very clean burns, but believe that from this time forward fairly good fires may be looked for provided that no heavy rain should fall within the next few days. Owing to the grass and rapid growth of underwood and weeds among the felled bush this season, the latest felled bush will probably burn the best…. Estimates of the bush felled awaiting burning within Waimate riding vary from 5000 up to 6000 acres. It is possible that even the latter area may be within the mark, as there are a great number of small patches scattered about which hardly any one knows of except the owners or immediate neighbours.

In the event the season proved to be disastrous. Local correspondents almost always did their best to look on the bright side and present an optimistic view of their district to the outside world. But the 1884 burning season was too much for the Star's ‘Kaupokonui’ ‘Our Own’. His column of 18 March reported that:

Since Friday and Saturday's downpour the chances of anything like a burn this season have become very small. Disgust and disappointment is now easily discernible on many a countenance that hitherto wore a genial and hopeful expression. I wonder if there ever was such a season before? No doubt at times the bush has been sufficiently dry, but there has never been anything like a wind—one of the main requirements to ensure a successful burn in this flat and open bush. The loss is one that would be difficult to estimate, not only individually, but to the district at large. I have no hesitation in saying that it will throw the whole of the bush country back for a period of at least five years. Verily, sir, a man's heart need be, not only as big as a stump, as one of my neighbours very aptly remarked, but as big as the tree itself.

Faith, Hope and Charity! Three of the brightest gems in the world's diadem, but unfortunately only applicable under certain circumstances. Why sir, the first year we came here we had to live on faith! Then we turned to the second best, and for a time were buoyed up and existed on hope. But now, from present appearances, it would seem as if we were about to realise the latter, in the fullest sense of the word…. Without doubt, days of toil and nights of anxious waiting are plainly perceptible to all. But as for the summer and winter, things have got so mixed and jumbled together that we know not when or where to expect them.

There was not only disillusion for the pioneer settlers but a drying up of the flow of new recruits to the district. Early in 1884 the government began advertising a big sale of south Taranaki bush sections in Hawera on 28 and 29 February, aimed at pushing settlement further to the north and west.9 The Gazette sale notice, over two pages long, listed a wide spread of 161 rural sections, 35 small farm allotments and 60 Village-Settlement allotments in the village settlements of Makaka and Punehu (modern Te Kiri). Of the rural sections 33 were in our Kaponga District. Apart from five just west of the township on Eltham Road these were all to the north, on Opunake Road and the upper reaches of Palmer, Manaia and Rowan roads. Using recent land law amendments, the man of small means was taken well into account. Some rural sections were offered on attractive perpetual-lease terms, and contested DP small-farm allotments were to be decided by lot and not bid up at auction as in earlier sales. But all the hard work and careful planning for this sale ended in an absolute debacle. Only one of the 256 sections was sold. The Star turned an almost blind eye to this calamitous event. The Lands Department annual report indicates that this was more than a south Taranaki problem. Two successive unusually wet seasons with failed bush burns had undermined the demand for bush land throughout the colony, and much that was ready for sale had been kept off the market.10

The ‘Kaupokonui’ settlers faced long, anxious months as they awaited a change in fortune. In the Star of 29 May their ‘Our Own’ noted that new sowings of grass were proving very backward, but was encouraged in that older clearings were rolling in feed. Two months later Okaiawa's ‘Our Own’ was pleased that ‘several Auckland gentlemen’ were in the village arranging for felling a large area of land they had bought in the district. The summer began inauspiciously. On 29 December the ‘Kaupokonui’ ‘Our Own’ wrote:

A sad time for the people in the bush, Mr. Editor, a sad time! Day after day nothing but rain. The morning breaks with it, the day ends with it, an everlasting drip, drip, drip. The branches of the huge pines are bent down with it, the younger trees are weeping under it, the roads are canals, all things are silent, with water everywhere. For eight days it has scarcely ceased.

On 8 January 1885 he described ‘the heaviest rainfall that I ever witnessed outside the tropics' but on 23 January 1885 he was at last able to report a spell of fine weather that had only to last a few days longer to bring some good burns, while consoling himself that ‘if the wood will not burn it will rot’. On 24 January he was elated:

Hurrah! for the good burns—our little world is jubilant. The 27th is a day. that will long be remembered here as the day of the general flare-up…. the fire in some cases carried the tops of the trees for over two miles. Night is now settling down, and the red streamers are hung out—hundreds of them, thousands of them. The bush around looks like a living forest of fire, and the moon overhead, as if riding in a sea of blood…. Stout hearts and strong hands are working with a will, hatless and coatless, blackened and begrimed. … Beating him back in some places, and in others urging him forward. The bush must be burnt, but the homesteads, if possible, must be saved…. On! On! he rushes, accomplishing in a few moments what it would take men years to perform.

It was a great turning point in the south Taranaki bush settlement. On 7 March the ‘Kaupokonui’ letter told of a burn in bush felled as late as Christmas:

I have not seen the burn, but have been told that it made a splendid sweep. A great deal of last season's felling was fired on Saturday last, the fire going clean through the standing thistles and making a grand clearance of the old timber. This season will have done a great deal towards permanently establishing the settlement of the bush. Had there followed another such as last, I believe a great many would have cleared out in disgust, and wandered away to fields and pastures new.

On 9 March he was actually pleased with an hour of heavy rain, remarking that ‘it is a great relief to once more breathe the pure, fresh air, after living for about a month in an atmosphere of smoke.’

The following season was even more favourable for bush clearance. With hard times felling contracts were being let at very cheap rates over the winter.11 As 1885 closed the beginnings of the long drought of my New Zealand's Burning were being experienced in the ‘Kaupokonui’. In mid-December its ‘Our Own’ reported burns of ‘the heaps left from previous years’. On 2 January 1886 he wrote of widespread burning of the current season's felling, telling how ‘a lot of persons who have been disappointed in previous years … are now acting on the saying “Better be sure than sorry” ‘. Looking back on the season on 13 March he told how the season's weather had given two splendid chances for burns, one before the drought broke, the other after. Later he told of burns continuing into April, making this the ‘boss bush-burning year’ for Taranaki.12

Within this broad picture of the interplay between administrators' plans and the vagaries of the weather how had the occupation of our Kaponga District been developing? Crown Lands Ranger G.F. Robinson's reports in July and December 188513 and the March 1886 census give some help in summing up. Robinson's first inspection of some DP lands in several survey districts, including Kaupokonui ones, showed that all had met the improvement conditions. On his second inspection of 30 holdings in the Ngaere and Kaupokonui districts he was satisfied with all except one Ngaere settler. Some others were behind in the area of land cleared and grassed but were ahead with other improvements. Twelve settlers had their families resident. In December 1885 Robinson reported on 108 DP sections in seven survey districts, including Kaupokonui ones. While he again found some a little behind in getting the land into grass he reported that this failure ‘has occurred through the wet seasons, and from no fault of their own’. His summing up applies to about 17 Kaponga District holdings. Overall, the results were very favourable. Whereas sections inspected for the first time should have had 10 per cent in grass, they actually averaged about 15 per cent. Those inspected for the second time, which should have been 20 per cent in grass, actually exceeded 37 per cent. Clearly the government's DP regulations were holding these settlers to their task and despite the bitter disappointments of the wet seasons they were making admirable progress.

It is not so easy to assess progress on the cash-sale land. Some purchases had been for speculative rather than settlement purposes. However, information collated from various sources gives a fair idea in most cases of when genuine settlement began. It seems that by the 1885–86 season at least nine bachelors and five families had settled on these holdings. So the first five years of settlement had seen the beginnings of about 30 farms in our District. Some of the clearings were manned by bachelors in primitive whares, others by families in more substantial homes.

By collating land sale records, family information and census returns, one gets something of a picture of Kaponga District on census day, Sunday, 28 March 1886.* The census breakdown of Hawera County's Waimate Riding, which embraced the country from the Waingongoro to the Taungatara Stream, just east of Opunake, shows only two significant population centres, Manaia town district with a population of 323 and Okaiawa village with 68. Kaponga's name does not even appear. Opunake, Rowan and Mangawhero roads are not listed, so apparently the north and west of our District was still awaiting settlers. It seems that our 30-odd clearings were scattered along, or near to, only three of the roads, Manaia Road with perhaps 32 people on twelve clearings, Eltham Road with about 22 persons on about seven clearings, and Palmer Road with about 19 residents on about 10 clearings. Nevertheless the settlers were widely scattered, and this would seem to have arisen from their having ‘read’ the District in differing ways when buying their sections. Those to the north must have seen it as the Taranaki Herald's ‘Traveller’ of November 1880 had done, as an area whose main link to the outside was to be via Opunake Road, through Stratford. Many of these were an interlinked group from Wellington province, part of a northward flow deriving from the Hutt Valley's pioneer settlers, whose surnames included Ellerm, Frethey, Hollard and Wilkie. Some came direct from the Hutt, while others were moving on from earlier migrations, first to the Wairarapa, later to the Manawatu. They were predominantly English in origin and a significant number were Methodists. The settlers along and south of Eltham Road were a more diverse group who had ‘read’ the District as linked to the outside world by the South Road, through Manaia and Hawera. A number of them may have been influenced by their vision of a more distant future as there was strong buying within easy access of the Neill Road railway reserve, running to the south of the planned Kaponga township. These ‘southern’ settlers contained a strong South Island element—Prestidges from Nelson, Crowleys and Fitzgeralds from the West Coast, Stoddart from Dunedin. In Old World origins they were a mixture of English, Irish and Scots.

The remaining three burning seasons of the decade, in the early months of 1887, 1888 and 1889, saw substantial extension of existing clearings and the beginning of a number of new ones. Hard times forced felling contract prices ever lower and 1887 and 1888 had splendid burning seasons. As early as 31 July 1886 the ‘Kaupokonui’ ‘Our Own’ reported 5000 acres of contracts already let. Looking back on this season, a Star (2/5/87) bush settler correspondent decided it had been perhaps the most favourable yet:

… the spring was ushered in with warm weather, which started the grass growing; the three summer months were everything that could be wished for; and a break early in February prevented an actual drought.

And by the winter of 1886 the flow of new settlers had revived. In the Star of 28 August the ‘Kaupokonui’ ‘Our Own’ reported settlement ‘going on apace in the back part of this block’, with most of the newcomers taking their land on perpetual lease. Land on Rowan Road was beginning to be taken up.14 Over the 1887 winter, despite still lower contract prices, felling by established settlers slackened somewhat15—after several good burning seasons they seem to have had almost a surfeit of grass.16 The following year saw another wonderful burning season, a great encouragement to the inflow of new settlers starting further new clearings on Rowan Road and also one or two along Opunake Road.17 In 1888 this inflow accelerated as new 1887 land legislation came into force. This gave the purchaser the choice of taking the land for cash, on DP, or on perpetual lease with right of purchase. Sections were put up at fixed prices based on the land's quality, and competing applications were decided by ballot.18 The 1888 winter saw bushfelling prices at rock bottom and a very large area was cleared.19 Late in 1888 the Star surveyed what had been achieved since settlers had crossed the Waingongoro. It estimated that of the Waimate Riding's 108,000 acres of bush, 35,000 acres were now felled, grassed and securely fenced. In the January 1889 Farmer, its ‘West Coast’ correspondent suggested that this understated the area felled. Since our Kaponga District was roughly the median strip in the flow of settlement across the Riding, we can probably safely say that by the end of the 1880s a good third of it was cleared.

Roads were a major concern in all new districts and especially so in the bush, where roadmaking faced particular difficulties. In terrain, climate, soils, land use and availability of roadmaking materials, south Taranaki faced special challenges. We have seen how the process of settlement scattered the Kaponga clearings particularly widely across the district, exacerbating the roaiding problem. So throughout our study we will find the roads at the centre of local politics, a subject of perennial debate, of recurrent tension, and of some innovative suggestion and experimentation.

The very features underlying the Kaponga District's future prosperity— its high rainfall, multiplicity of streams and fertile volcanic soils—were banes for the roadmakers. The District also shared south Taranaki's general lack of good road metal. So the making and maintaining of the roads presented a tough series of challenges. First there was the clearing of the road lines, then the mastering of the streams. Having overcome these, there still remained what long seemed an unwinnable battle: the creation of a load bearing surface that would not disappear in the winter mud. We will first examine these practical and technical problems in more detail and then probe the social and political context in which they were attacked. This context of course included the initial series of heartbreaking wet seasons and the deepening gloom of hard times, which limited the resources available for all public projects.

The surveyors did the first primitive clearing of road lines, to gain access for their work and make the land accessible enough to be marketed. In the south Taranaki bush almost all road clearing was one chain wide.20 Sheltered by the surrounding bush from sun and winds, this felling did not dry out readily and seldom resulted in a good burn. To discourage bush regrowth and aid future settlers, these fellings were seeded with grass each autumn. In many cases no more was done, so the pioneer settler wended his way to his section through logs and stumps, with the occasional diversion around the trunk of an unfelled giant rata. He often led in a house cow, which he could graze on the road-line grass, but initially there was seldom enough feed for the more voracious appetite of a riding horse. The way forward to improve on this miserable access was not clear either to the settler or to the public bodies involved. Did one manhandle the logs to the side of the clearing and begin laboriously to stump a smooth pathway down the middle, following the numerous roots down into the depths of the earth?21 This was costly work, and though it could give a good cart track in a dry summer it was likely in winter to degenerate into what one settler described as ‘a model canal’ as the lowered track in the centre drained the debris thrown to the sides.22

In the short term public poverty meant that little was done, and this was, even if unintentionally, wisdom. For the fortunes of the roads were tied up with those of the settlers' clearings. When at last the good burns came, they swept the roads as well as the clearings. In the meantime the trampling of stock after the road-line grass, the passage of settler traffic, the scavenging of the felled timber for firewood by surveyors, bushfelling gangs, settlers and others, and the general processes of decay year by year broke down and removed quantities of the debris. As they toughed out the early waterlogged years, the settlers found wayfaring often miserable, sometimes dangerous. In the winter of 1882 a settler complaining of his clearing being besieged by cattle pushed into the bush by greedy open-country settlers described his

Along the bush roads there are at present numerous lata trees which were burnt down some time ago, and there has been no attempt made to remove them. Settlers who use these roads cut a make-shift track round, and so the matter rests—and so do the trees. Strangers and even residents find it rather awkward, coming along in the dark, to be brought to a standstill by a forest giant barring the way.

… I would also like to draw your attention to a common, but dangerous, practice in this district. Along almost every road numbers of horses are kept tethered, and some with ropes long enough to stretch three or four times across the 16 ft track. Persons riding and driving in the daytime find it a difficult matter to get past, but what must it be after dark. A rider comes along, and the first intimation that he gets of a horse being on the road is a heels-over-head tumble.

Along with their struggle with the forest debris, the roadmakers laboured to master the watercourses. Few motorists cruising these roads today are conscious of the sturdy culverts carrying the numerous streams flowing beneath them. The pioneer settlers were often only too aware of their primitive culverts. With drainpipes an unaffordable luxury, wood was used. Within a few years much of the timber was rotting and collapsing and had to be excavated from the packed earth with which it had been covered.24 It was probably to lighten this task, and with the prospect of early replacement with drainpipes, that by 1886 the builders were laying them -selves open to criticism for a more flimsy approach. In the Star of 30 September 1886 the ‘Kaupokonui’ ‘Our Own’ complained of the primitive nature of some new culverts on Eltham Road:

The wooden cross pieces of the culverts are not nailed, but merely placed on the top of the two side slabs. A few inches of earth on top and the culvert looks all serene, but after the earth is beaten down a horse is liable to shift one of the top slabs, and put a foot through. Result—broken leg …

Larger streams had to be forded until there were funds for bridges and not many of these were undertaken in the 1880s. So the hazardous fording of flooded rivers was another of the trials of the pioneers.

The roadmakers' long-term aim was to create a durable macadam surface equal in all seasons to the demands of the settlers' steadily increasing traffic. This required costly clearance of the forest debris, followed by costly grading to give a cambered and elevated roadway to ensure good surface drainage. What happened in the absence of these essential prerequisites for good macadam surfaces was demonstrated on the most used bush roads of the early years of the decade. In the Star of 17 May 1882 the Normanby ‘Our Own’ reported:

The road to the Plains, that from Waingongoro to Manaia, and from Okaiawa to the bush called Ahipaipa Road, are in a frightful state of mud, and frequent stickings up in the well-puddled clay are experienced by teamsters, thus early in the winter. Carters with horse teams have had to turn out their animals and purchase bullocks; and settlers with spring carts have had to discard them temporally [sic] and return to the primitive method of packing their necessary supplies.

The Kaponga pioneers who travelled these roads to get to their sections were not to know that the standard macadam programme was to prove heartbreakingly difficult to apply in their district. A couple of decades later the road linking their township to Manaia was being described as ‘a roadless roadway’25 and what a trip to their nearest railway station was like may be deduced from this account by ‘Rambler’ in the Star of 14 December 1901:

Anyone wishing to experience a lively ride should just take a drive in a light trap from Eltham to Opunake. The game of shuttlecock will be reenacted, only the difference of playthings will be painfully apparent to the experimenter. Life is full of ups and downs we all admit, but the job on the Eltham-Opunake road when driving is to know whether life with such uncertainties is worth living.

But we must return to the 1880s to see how the roading challenge was tackled within the social and political context of the times. An illustration will help highlight some of the issues. In August 1887 Captain Anderson, a recently arrived DP settler on upper Palmer Road, waited on the Waimate Road Board to point out

… that in order to get to his section he has to go up the Duthie and then come down the Palmer road, but that the Duthie road is obstructed by trees, and the Palmer by a large amount of undergrowth. The Kapuni crossed the Palmer below his section, and it could not be got over. (Star, 2/9/87)

The board's engineer thought that a ford could be made over the Kapuni for about £15, so to solve Anderson's problem the board resolved ‘that the Land Board be requested to place the sum of £15, out of the £22 now available for this road, to the credit of the board for this crossing’. Such piecemeal decisionmaking to meet an individual's problems is frequently evident in the board's minutes. Our account will need to make clear why this was so, and explain the tangled interplay between Road Board, Land Board and individual settler. We will also need to clarify why, if settlers had first come to these northern reaches of the Kaponga District on the assumption that they would be serviced from Stratford, Anderson was so clearly seeking an outlet to the south, where the nearest centre is about five miles further away from his section than was Stratford. The best way to explain these matters will be to look first at the changing fortunes of the east-west routes in south Taranaki's cross-hatch roading pattern.

These east-west routes were first mapped out by surveyors in response to the government's instructions on its military strategy requirements and settlement intentions. The diverse requirements led to their sketching in a surfeit of these roads—five of which were to be developed, with vestiges of a sixth—when practical realities would suggest that there should have been a disciplined concentration on perhaps three in the first decade. For the first three or four years the government supplied the bulk of the money and called the tune. Thereafter the funding fell mainly on the settlers and the decisionmaking on the local bodies. We will examine the fortunes of these roads during the decade, beginning from the south.

As we have seen, the existing South Road was rapidly upgraded to service the first rush of settlers onto the open country. The Armed Constabulary made a significant contribution to this work and also helped considerably with Normanby Road, which ran partly through bush, partly through open country, linking their older stronghold at Waihi with their new redoubt at Manaia. Their involvement highlights the strategic element in the early concentration on these two roads. Not much was left to be done to them when, under the Roads and Bridges Construction Act 1882, they were declared main roads for which the government would meet three-quarters of the cost of approved construction work. By this time on Normanby Road all clearing, culverting and road formation had been completed and two substantial bridges built. When its main-road status was removed in 1883 it was described as ‘a loop-line to the main coach-road from Hawera to Manaia’—in other words its development had been in excess of basic settlement requirements. However, in their early years the ‘Kaupokonui’ bush settlers came to know it well, the most used access route to their sections being by Normanby Road to Okaiawa and then up Ahipaipa Road.26 When, as in the winter of 1885, they found Ahipaipa Road to be ‘a model canal’ and ‘a capital site for a brick works’27 they must have wished that some of the early investment lavished on the South and Normanby roads had been spread a little more fairly further into the bush. Certainly the next east-west route, Skeet Road, could have done with some of it. For years its main streams remained unbridged and the clearing of logs and stumps westward of Ahipaipa Road did not begin till July 1888.28

We now move to the three northern east-west roads, dealing first, briefly, with the vestigial Neill Road and then treating Opunake and Eltham roads more fully. Neill Road was on the Opunake branch railway reserve which left the main line just south of Eltham. The branch line did not ultimately follow this route, but as they laid it out it assumed a place of considerable importance in the surveyors' minds. They made it a survey block boundary along its entire length and over 1881–82 had it felled from the Waingongoro to Manaia Road.29 It appears as Neill Road for a short distance near Eltham and between Manaia and Palmer roads, where it created administrative problems for the Road Board, not being legally a road and so not entitled to DP thirds, yet being the only access to some sections. Elsewhere it provided cleared back-boundary strips for some fortunate settlers on the south side of Eltham Road, to whom it was leased. Funds spent on this line were in reality largely wasted in view of the desperate needs elsewhere.

Opunake Road enjoyed an early prominence, followed by a convincin downgrading. It probably assumed an undue significance in the minds of the surveyors both from its strategic importance up to the time of the Parihaka showdown in 1881, and also as the direct link between the Waimate Plains bush and Stratford, which they would see had a secure destiny as Taranaki's main inland town. It was also the most obvious route to their own work in the bush from their homes in New Plymouth. Conversely, in laying out Eltham Road they may have somewhat underestimated its long-term prospects, especially as its planned base on the railway, the Eltham village settlement, was a much less ambitious concept than the already established town of Stratford. The surveyors had been instructed to select village sites ‘every three or four miles along the main road-lines at convenient spots in the Waimate Plains',30 and some ambivalence in their estimates of the relative ‘main’ status of these two roads is suggested by their giving each a village site (Makaka and Kaponga) and placing a third (Punehu) at their junction.31 Opunake Road received a strong boost following the passing of the Roads and Bridges Construction Act 1882. Claiming that when Stratford was first put on the market the government had promised to make Opunake Road, the Stratford settlers mounted a strong campaign over the winter of 1882, and with local member Harry Atkinson's assistance succeeded in getting it put on the first list of main roads.32 However, it received only one relatively small sum under the act before being removed from the schedule in 1883.33 Felling, culverting and road formation by the Survey Department continued for another year or two.34 Once government expenditure ceased the local bodies had so little money for the road's upkeep that some reaches virtually disappeared. In April 1889 the Hawera County Council resolved to instruct its foreman to have a pack track made on the stretch between the Manaia and Auroa Roads, and in August 1890 a Taranaki county ratepayer complained that the stretch from the Mountain Road to the county boundary was ‘quite unsafe for traffic’ and ‘fit for cattle traffic only’.35

Commenting on roads removed from the main-roads schedule, the Surveyor-General explained that Opunake Road had been opened up ‘for strategical purposes in connection with the Native difficulty’ and that ‘the further opening-up of the country has made known a better line of connection between Opunake and the railway-line’.36 This, of course, was Eltham Road, also on the first main-roads schedule. That it was ‘a better line’ should have been evident from the start. It crossed the heart of the bush country being opened up whereas Opunake Road was in poorer country near its northern periphery. It provided reasonably level access from the railway whereas Opunake Road had a long hard climb of some 330 feet in the first five miles from Stratford. Reading between the lines, it seems that by 1881, before Stratford began championing the Opunake Road, there had been a quiet plumping for Eltham Road by the Survey Department. Its report on Taranaki for the year to 30 June 1882 showed all bush roads being felled one chain wide except for Eltham Road, which was two chains. Also, in this and the next two years more was spent on Eltham Road than on any other Taranaki road.

By the time government spending faded away in the mid-1880s Eltham Road was generally accepted as the ‘main’ road through these bush districts. But an immense amount of work remained for the Road Board before it deserved to be called a road. Although felling and most culverting of the smaller streams had been done, stumping and forming had barely begun, and almost all the rivers were unbridged. So the impoverished Waimate Road Board began a long struggle first to make, and thereafter to maintain, the road at a standard befitting its ‘main’ status. The ‘Kaupokonui’ ‘Our Own’ followed this slow progress. On 29 July 1885 he noted that a substantial bridge was almost completed over the Kapuni River. But the road had yet to reach this bridge, for on 15 March 1886 he reported stumping and forming nearly completed from Eltham township to Duthie Road—still over a mile short of the Kapuni. This roading was still ungravelled, so not surprisingly when winter set in he reported it

… in a horrible state just now, several cuttings being almost impassable… it is the most important road in the district, and if a good main road were made through the district, it would benefit settlers more than having a lot of roads only half done. I suppose the half improved condition of roads is brought about by the board trying to please everyone—by spending driblets in all directions …(Star, 30/9/86)

But the regime under which road boards operated made it difficult to work in any other way. The Waimate board's boundaries stretched from the sea to the mountain and from the Waingongoro to the Taungatara Stream, near Opunake. In its early years this district provided only a limited income from settlers' rates. Rather the board depended largely on the Land Act's provision of one-third of the proceeds of DP sections for ‘the construction of roads within, or to open up the block for the benefit of settlers’. In bush districts the expenditure of their thirds was expected to be a major source of DP settlers' income in their early years. They counted on winning a fair share of the roadwork tenders handy to their sections. The act provided that ‘the plans of proposed roads shall in all cases receive the sanction of the Waste Land Boards of the district’. Under scrutiny from the settlers on one side and the Waste Land Board on the other, the Road Board kept a separate account for each road, and related expenditure on it to its DP thirds and rates income. Of course funds had to be diverted to meet the greater usage of arterial roads, but the road by road accounting allowed everyone to see what was going on. The whole setup encouraged a ‘dribs and drabs’ approach. We will now concentrate on how, within this context, the Road Board dealt with the particular needs of the Kaponga District. This will add the north-south Palmer, Manaia and Rowan roads to the picture.

In its early days the Road Board delayed spending on the bush roads, having found that, without consulting it, the government was spending generously on some of them. It decided that ‘it would have been foolish for the board to step in and prevent them from continuing such expenditure’.37 Manaia Road was on the initial main-roads schedule but the government had not got far with developing it before it withdrew from active involvement. This road was a headache for the Road Board as here and there it caught the eastern edge of difficult ground, sticky clays overlying ‘iron-stone’ that inhibited drainage. Later geological knowledge showed that shifting parts of the line just a little to the east would have avoided the problem. The Road Board inherited a different problem with Palmer Road. By mistake government money intended for its clearing was spent elsewhere, and work by the board left it ‘in debt’ for years, thereby at a disadvantage in the lobbying between roads.38. These problems on Manaia and Palmer roads concentrated traffic to the upper parts of the district on Duthie Road, which continually deteriorated under the pressure. Meanwhile as settlement flowed westwards the needs of Rowan Road became pressing. A glance at a sample of the arrangements made for this road will give some idea of the intricate interplay of local roading politics.

In the 1883–84 year, before it withdrew from the game, the government made a moderate beginning with the felling of Rowan Road. In the spring of 1886 the Road Board demonstrated its growing political sophistication by authorising several of the settlers to fell and burn the roadway adjoining their sections provided they felled at least two chains into their adjoining lands. Over the next year or two a flow of settler requests, petitions and deputations pressured the board to push on with the road and with its links with the outside world. Complicating negotiations were divergences of interest between settlers on the upper and lower sections of the road, and the fact that they included two men of some ‘weight’, local politician Felix McGuire, and Walter Stoddart, a substantial landholder on both Rowan and Manaia roads who served for a time on the Road Board. In 1887 some upper Rowan Road settlers persuaded the board to spend the money in credit to the road on their stretch of the road and on Eltham Road. It had already been generally accepted that the board should take money from the ‘side’ roads for Manaia Road, the ‘main’ road linking them with the outside world. These adjustments led lower Rowan Road settlers McGuire, Gallagher and King to feel that their interests were being neglected. In November 1887 they waited on the board. Gallagher stated that his roading thirds amounted to £80 yet only £15 had been spent on the road. Felix McGuire claimed he had spent £1400 to get his land all in grass but could not get a single head of cattle to it. He offered to pay for the work in the meantime and wait for the board to repay him. The board agreed to spend £20 to start stumping and ditching from Eltham Road southward. In November 1888 King was back to see the board, accompanied by former board member Walter Stoddart. Stoddart pointed out that over a mile of felled timber had yet to be cleared from their section of the road and claimed that there had been more than enough money to do this. The chairman reminded him that he had been one of the board members who had agreed to money being taken for Manaia Road, and another board member pointed out that Manaia Road had proved a very expensive road to make but that doing so had benefited all the district's settlers.39

This brief Rowan Road survey illustrates the intricacies of the board's affairs as it responded to a stream of pleading letters and received a succession of mud-spattered delegations trekking down from the bush with their hard-luck stories. Palmer Road, for example, where in 1887 Captain Anderson had had such problems getting to his section, still in 1888 had stumping and culverting in progress along much of its length, and even some felling.40 While juggling with incessant demands for improved north-south access routes through the bush, the Board staggered under its inherited excess of east-west arterial routes. Its failure to find funds to bridge the Kaupokonui at Kaponga limited the benefits from years of heavy expenditure on Eltham Road. The bulk of the growing traffic from the bush was thus forced onto the already burdened South Road, which deteriorated under the pressure while also facing the decay of some of its older bridges. The Hawera County Council accordingly took a poll in 1889 for a £2000 loan to renew bridges and remetal, but this was voted down,41 partly through a persistent bush ratepayer wariness of being taken advantage of by the more affluent open-country settlers. This undercurrent in local politics deserves our brief attention.

In discussing Waimate Plain bush road problems the Yeoman of 1 June 1883 remarked that bush settlers were poorly represented on the Road Board because few of them had the time to go to Manaia to vote. Fortunately for Kaponga its storekeeper, Henry Davy,* represented it on the board from 1885 to 1887. On his resignation through pressure of work involved, the returning officer arranged a Kaponga polling place for local convenience. The board's next meeting ruled this out of order, insisting that Manaia be the sole polling place.42 In the Star of 8 May 1888 J.W. Kenah, a public-spirited and knowledgeable Mangatoki bush settler, pointed out that board meetings were advertised only in the Star's daily issues, while many bush settlers took the weekly edition. With the majority of the board's members living on the plains he saw nothing to prevent them grabbing the bush rates to spend in the open.

It should now be clear why Kaponga township was so long in taking off and why things began to move towards the end of the decade. The Kaponga village settlement went on sale in September 1882 as 40 township sections of a quarter acre up to one acre and nearly 40 small-farm allotments of just over 3 acres up to 50 acres. Even long-term speculators saw little that attracted them at this stage, so this unfelled site, difficult of access from all directions, and with only a thin scatter of settlers in its vicinity, languished for some years. Then it quietly began to see more life. Early on Henry Davy started storekeeping ‘in a very small way’43 on the northern edge of the township site, and gradually his business grew to provide something of a local centre. In June 1887 Davy became the township's first postmaster, with mails delivered to his store twice weekly44. In the September 1887 general election, after both candidates had considered it worthwhile holding meetings in Kaponga,45 Davy's store was a polling place to save '30 to 40 electors' a ‘journey through the mud’ to Manaia,46 and 32 actually voted there.47 In 1887 things began moving with the township's roads, with the Road Board letting the felling of the ‘village roads leading towards the Kaupokonui stream’ in May.48 In October, on receiving advice that the government proposed to include the felling of Kaponga village in the estimates, the Land Board withdrew it from sale.49 In November the Road Board agreed that the road through the town should be cleared 20 feet instead of 12.50 Presumably this was Eltham Road, whose stumping and clearing must by now have been approaching the township site from the east.

By 1888, then, the growing population west, east and north of Kaponga would have been flowing more easily over improving road lines to the village site on recurrent journeys down Manaia Road to Manaia and the South Road. Two prerequisites for a township take-off were still lacking— the felling of the site and the bridging of the Kaupokonui. With an impecunious government dragging its feet on a vote for clearing the site, the ‘Kaupokonui’ settlers prodded it with a unanimously signed petition on the matter in mid-1888.51 The government was pushing land settlement as an answer to both its budget and employment problems, so the settlers had a strong case. With news of new bush settlers at every Land Board meeting, the Hawera County Council presented the government with a proposal for making Eltham Road passable by wheeled traffic throughout its length. The County promised to do the road formation if the government would bridge the streams.52 Meanwhile, with a large number of houses going up throughout the ‘Kaupokonui’,53 the search for timber moved inland and in October sawmiller Robert Palmer gained Road Board permission to lay a bush tramline across Neill Road.54 A visit in November by the county council chairman to the local member, Prime Minister Harry Atkinson, about help with Eltham Road, brought the Minister of Lands to the district with a promise of a bridge over the Kaupokonui before the summer was out.55 The government kept its word with a cart bridge of 71ft 6in (main span 55ft) on concrete piers. It also began clearing the township site, with the felling of 18 acres at the junction of Manaia and Eltham roads.56 Others, too, were moving to put the place on the map, with the Methodists opening Kaponga's first church building in May 1889.57 Kaponga was becoming a little more than a name scrawled in charcoal upon a pukatea tree.

The Kaponga district owes the very nature of its existence to the peak that dominates its skyline. Its weather and climate, its soils and topography, the location and shapes of the landscapes its settlers crafted, are all only adequately explained when the mountain is included in the picture. We leave the larger story of Egmont's geological and human history to others, but we must say something of its place in the psyche of the Kaponga community and of their involvement in its affairs.

Uncleared virgin bush dominated the Kaponga landscape throughout the decade. Its place in the settlers' lives and minds is evident in a Star (22/4/86) report on an ill-considered expedition that left Manaia for the mountain on Friday, 16 April 1886. Two men were about to set out for Dawson Falls and Fantham's Peak when two women decided to join them at the last moment, delaying the start by two hours. This led to their being caught by darkness before reaching the falls and becoming lost. A tent was pitched for the women and the men bivouacked by a large fire. On the Saturday morning they made an early start and successfully reached Fantham's Peak. They then decided to do some exploring by following the Kaupokonui until it struck Opunake Road. Throughout the day they constantly heard wild cattle in the bush and saw ‘thousands’ of pigeons. Fatigued by a 14-hour day of hard travelling they at last reached the pack track and pitched their tent. They had run out of food but were able to shoot a good supply of pigeons, which they roasted on spits and washed down with tea brewed by the cupful in a small jam tin. They made a lazy start on the Sunday, one of the party eventually setting off to fetch their horses from Manaia Road. When he reached them about 3pm he discovered that every man in Kaponga had been out since 8am searching for his party. He recalled these search parties by firing his gun for 20 minutes. All then proceeded to Kaponga, where ‘refreshments were forthcoming at nearly every house’. Meanwhile further search parties were already being organised in Manaia.

From this episode we learn several things about the ‘Kaupokonui’ wild: its richness in game, especially wild cattle and pigeons; a settler fascination with exploring it; and an awareness of the possibilities of accidents and of getting lost, countered by mutual watchfulness and a facility for rapidly assembling search parties. Hunting, exploring and occasional short searches must have continually taken the settlers into the bush, with only the occasional episode reaching the level of ‘news’. The ‘Kaupokonui’ bush did not, in fact, prove to be particularly hazardous. The clear indications of direction provided by the local topography, the wide scatter of clearings, and the cross-hatch of road lines, all meant that it was not easy to get lost, that one's movements were fairly well monitored, and that help was fairly quickly at hand in an emergency.

We now turn to the wild on the individual settler's holding. Here a major issue of the 1880s was backpegging. Most of the Kaupokonui bush sections initially had boundary pegs only on their road frontages. When Prime Minister Sir Frederick Whitaker visited Hawera in January 1883 this was one settler concern put to him. He was told of one man who had mistakenly felled 17 acres of his neighbour's bush, for which this neighbour refused to pay. Whitaker was surprised to learn that the surveyors had not cut sectional lines. Harry Atkinson, who was accompanying him, explained that it had been found useless to cut lines in bush land that was selling slowly, as they became overgrown before the land was occupied. Whitaker promised to look into the matter.60 He probably found that the surveyors were pushing on with this work as fast as their resources would allow, which was just as well as DP settlers were under an obligation to make progress with felling and fencing, and there were reportedly many instances of felling and grassing across unmarked boundaries.61

For a time the Survey Department apparently sent a surveyor and chainman and expected the two settlers involved to supply the labour to cut the lines, but this didn't work out very well because it meant in practice that

when the two settlers immediately interested had milked their cows, chopped their wood, fed the pigs and calves, and done a few more odd jobs, they would go off to the line-cutting, and stay there until it was time for them to knock off and repeat those useful, but withal prosaic operations in the evening. As a natural consequence, the time of the surveyor and his assistant was terribly frittered away …62

Finding that it could do the whole job more smoothly and almost as cheaply without this kind of assistance, the department dispensed with it. Settlers probably often continued to help, appreciating the company of the surveyors and being keen to see where their boundaries lay. In September 1883 an accident provided a news item on one such instance. Surveyor Alfred Atkinson and chainman Thomas Harrison were backpegging in a block between the Duthie and Palmer roads. Some of the men were chopping a large matai tree and as it fell the party took shelter under another large tree nearby. Unfortunately a dead limb was dislodged from this latter tree and in falling it broke chainman Harrison's leg and stunned and bruised settler Henry Downey. Harrison was carried by stretcher to Okaiawa and driven from there to a doctor in Hawera, arriving after midnight.63 The accident may have happened deep in the bush as three months earlier Downey had had only 18 acres of his 320-acre block felled.64 Backpegging did not solve all boundary problems. The surveyors' matai pegs were often destroyed in the bush burns, others were knocked out by fencers putting in strainer posts and driven in again ‘somewhere thereabouts’. Such happenings were said to cause ‘no end of disputes’ in bush districts.65

From this survey of the context it should now be fairly clear why the Kaponga District settlers had so little consciousness of a Maori dimension to their lives. They did not displace Maori, for the back reaches of the bush had not been used as a Maori resource for some decades. New farm animals and crops had provided ample food nearer to home for a population diminished by the coming of the Pakeha muskets and diseases.

Most newcomers to Kaponga, whether from the Old World or elsewhere in the colony, brought no knowledge of Maori. Few gained more than a superficial understanding from their life in the district. As we have seen, they had plenty of problems of their own, and will have left Maori concerns to those affected by them, such as their neighbours to the south on the Continuous Reserve. When Maori protests did reach them they were expressed in the forms of an alien culture and so had little chance of penetrating the strong defences of their settler prejudices. But one or two of the district's settlers had grown up among Maori, with ample opportunities for understanding. One such was W.K. Howitt,* who comes into our story in Part 3 as a storekeeper and gifted ‘Our Own’ on the western fringe of our district. Late in life he wrote of his early years at Okato:

My youth was spent in a Maori district and some of the finest Maori rangatiras were our nearest neighbours; their sons and daughters sat at the same school desks as we sat and ran some of us hard for the highest positions in the class. There was a big family of us and we got steeped in Maori lore and Maori codes of honour…. Our mother, who was of Highland descent, loved the native people. She fraternised with them a good deal because of their likeness to her own race and clan, and when our eldest sister was born (the first white child born in that locality) the Maoris … wanted to adopt her into their tribe. This same sister … had as her greatest friends some of the finest Maori men and women in Taranaki.66

In his childhood and youth Howitt had met both Te Whiti and Titokowaru. He claims to have known Titokowaru ‘very well’, and as a boy been ‘very familiar with Te Whiti's appearance’. He attended Te Whiti's funeral in 1907.67 Surely here was someone who would have raised his neighbours' awareness of the injustices that Taranaki Maori had suffered? Not so, if (as they probably do) the attitudes expressed in his two books on pioneer life reflect his lifelong outlook.

Howitt's books are thoroughly one-sided in their justification of all that the settlers had done. There is reference to the ‘devastation caused by hostile Maori’68 but complete silence on the devastations inflicted by the pakeha. We are told of ‘how gallantly the Maoris fought for what they thought were their rights'69 but given no hint that they may indeed have had some right on their side. Yet Te Whiti had obviously deeply influenced Howitt. He wrote:

Te Whiti was not a blood-thirsty old rebel like many who lived within the bounds of his pa…. We were drawn to him in a way that few Maoris could influence us, and there is always something good in those who attract young people…. He used to make men do work which women were accustomed to do, and in this, as far as the Maoris were concerned, he was a long way ahead of his time. If there really were prophets among the Maoris, Te Whiti was one. He was a mystic and he was a student…70

But John Bryce's march on Parihaka is repeatedly and fulsomely justified. He is presented as a gallant leader who ‘taught a misguided Maori prophet the lesson he had to learn’. The march ‘clipped the wings of the disturbers and dispersed them’.71 Howitt managed to believe that Te Whiti turned from pacifism to fighting speeches, threatening war, leaving the government no option but to take him on. He also believed that when Fox and Bell ‘came to our district to allocate a fair proportion of land to the Natives … they did their work well, their one object seeming to be to do full justice to the requirements of the Natives’.72

We have quoted Howitt at length to show how, even with his long, close and friendly association with Maori and better than average education,73 he was quite unable to rise above settler self-interest and racist prejudice. Most settlers lacked Howitt's advantages; to them Maori matters would have been of only marginal interest. Coming mainly from Old World backgrounds where the economy and public affairs were managed by their ‘betters’, they were grappling with creating a new democratic community based on a rural economy meshed into international markets. From the 1880s on the yeoman settler was unquestionably the main protagonist in south Taranaki, dominating it by his numbers and reshaping its landscape in accordance with his dreams. Much of his attention was directed abroad, searching for useful agricultural innovations, scanning distant markets, monitoring rival producers. In their home community Kaponga settlers gave infinitely more thought to handling differences between English, Scottish, Irish and Swiss traditions than to understanding what to them was the archaic, fading world of the Maori. All this is understandable and to a large extent forgivable in the context of the times. But that they misunderstood and largely ignored the potent challenge that Te Whiti set ringing down the years does not excuse later generations from hearing its claims and examining their merits.