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2010345108Line breaks have only been retained for non-prose elements.The Women of New ZealandHelen M. SimpsonPaul's Book ArcadeAuckland and Hamilton: New ZealandGeorge Allen and Unwin: London1962Source copy consulted: DU420 S613 W 1962
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The first half of this book gives a vivid description of the lives of the women of New Zealand under the most rigorous pioneering conditions. The second half is a very able and witty account of the place of women in New Zealand society, and of the part played by women's organizations in the community, past and present. The whole book is marked by deep knowledge, historical judgment, imagination and literary skill.
The Women of New Zealand was first published in 1940 as one of a series of Centennial Surveys commissioned by the New Zealand government. It was at once recognized as an important contribution to New Zealand historical writing and literature and it sold out within a year. Since then copies have become collector's pieces.
This new edition has been published in response to strong public demand. It contains a postscript which surveys the position of New Zealand women during the last twenty years and a number of new illustrations specially selected by the author.
Illustrated
The Jacket Design Is Adapted By Janet Paul From The Drawing By William Bambridge
The Women of New Zealand
The Women of New ZealandbyHelen M. SimpsonPaul's Book ArcadeAuckland and Hamilton: New ZealandLondon: George Allen and Unwin1962
First published1940
New edition with postscript1962
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act,1956, no portion may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher.
Printed in Great BritainBy Bradford and DickensLondon W.C.I
To
M. W. R. & F. H. R.
& to A. B. S.
for their inspiration
&
his long-suffering
Preface to First Edition
The Story of the women of New Zealand, especially in the early years, is so largely the story of the men of New Zealand that it has been impossible in this survey always to avoid trespassing on the ground covered by other volumes in the series. I have, however, stepped as delicately as seemed to me possible; and whereever trespass has been avoidable I have avoided it: where brevity was essential the slaying of other men's wasps could be no advantage. If therefore I have seemed to deal somewhat cavalierly with, for instance, the artists among New Zealand women, this only is the reason, that I believe them to be elsewhere given their due. Similarly, incidental reference only has been made to the women of the Maori people—it is even less easy to consider them separately from the men of their race, to whose story a special volume is devoted.
A further difficulty has been the comparative lack of records other than those written by men and from the man's point of view. It will therefore be necessary for readers of this volume to read it, as I have tried to write it, with imaginative sympathy. The early chapters particularly may appear at first sight to contain too little specific reference to the women and their life and occupations as distinct from the men and theirs. I can only affirm that in writing them I have never in fact lost sight of my subject, and that they have been written throughout from the woman's point of view.
I have to acknowledge the help of numerous correspondents who have supplied details of various kinds; and to assure them that, although they may not recognise their contributions in the form in which they appear, they have actually all been of great assistance, and none has in fact been ignored. There may be some disappointment felt at the almost complete suppression of names. My task as I saw it was to write, not of women, but of the women, of New Zealand. And for every one of these that I could name there are thousands that I could not. If I had given all those supplied, my survey would have been little more than a series of lists, and still justice would not have been served.
Special acknowledgements are due to Mr A. H. Reed, of Dunedin, who generously allowed me to use the unpublished journals of Mrs J. W. Stack; and to Miss E. H. Hyndman, of Christchurch, to whose enquiries I owe a great part of my information with regard to the hours, wages, and conditions generally, of early women workers in New Zealand.
Helen M. SimpsonChristchurchOctober 1939
Grateful acknowledgement is made by the publishers to the Department of Internal Affairs, New Zealand, for permission to reprint this book which originally appeared as one of the New Zealand Centennial Surveys of 1940-1941.
Contents
PrefaceviiBefore Waitangi1The Voyage34The Early Home-Makers67Social Pleasures117Occupations145Women in Association166Postscript: since1940187Some Sources195A Note on the Illustrations199Index201
Illustrations
(see p. 199)
Work, 1846FrontispieceMap showing Bay of Islands before1840.facing page 1Missionary Station at Paihia, 182720The Ship Kenilworth: Outward Bound for New Zealand34Dance on board the Emigrant Ship, Randolph52A Settler's Hut86Reconstruction of a Cob House Kitchen106A Musical Evening126A Taranaki Home138
1Before Waitangi
The History of New Zealand as a British colony begins officially with the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in February 1840; but even if we disregard, as we must do in view of the limits set, the work of exploration and survey so admirably performed by Captain Cook, its roots are to be found in earlier years; and the story of the women of New Zealand opens on a day in the summer of 1814, when, on 22 December, the brig Active arrived off one of the many beaches of the Bay of Islands with the three missionaries sent out at Marsden's earnest instigation by the Church Missionary Society. They were Thomas Kendall, who had been a schoolmaster in London; William Hall, a carpenter, who had been sent by the Society to Hull to learn something of ship-building and navigation; and John King. John King was a shoe-maker by trade, but before being sent out to Marsden he had been instructed in flax-dressing, twine-spinning and rope-making. These three men were to be the forerunners of the missionaries proper; they were, in the words of the Society's report, merely 'to prepare the way and lay the foundation,' Hall and King by the application of their crafts and trades 'to the immediate wants' of the Maoris, while Kendall's work was to be largely concerned with the language and its reduction to some systematic written form. Any spare time was to be used 'as schoolmasters and catechists, to the religious care of the youth, and through them to the enlightening and instruction of the natives themselves.' If they were successful in the establishment of a small Christian community, 'living together in habits of industry, piety, and love,' the Committee's intention was to send out 'a suitable clergyman further to prosecute their design in the formation of a regular mission.' This was in accordance with Marsden's ideas as to the kind of mission most suitable for New Zealand.
Hall and King were the first to leave England, in 1809, Kendall remaining to study the latest methods of teaching. The prosecution of Marsden's scheme was in the event held up for some years. After the Boyd massacre and the revenge taken on the Maoris by the whalers, masters would not risk their ships in New Zealand waters; and it was not until 1813 that Kendall was sent out to join his fellow missionaries, and not until the end of 1814 that Marsden's experiment could be tried.
These then were the pioneers of organised white settlement in New Zealand, and they were accompanied by their wives. Kendall had been married for some time before he left England. He had five children (a sixth was born soon after they arrived in Sydney, but the child did not live); and the three sons came with their parents to the Bay of Islands, the daughters being left temporarily at Port Jackson. Hall was married shortly before he came to New South Wales to 'a young woman of suitable character and temperament' for a missionary life; and when they came to New Zealand there was one son; and King married while in Australia, and he and his wife also brought one son to New Zealand. The three women therefore already had some experience of early colonial life; but Mrs Kendall and Mrs Hall at least had left the known ways of England with the full intention of making their homes in a country of which they can have heard but little, and that little not very encouraging. Their inevitable ignorance of what lay before them may well have made the initial steps easier for them. The Halls and John King were given passages to New South Wales in a convict ship in return for work to be performed (by the men certainly, possibly by the woman as well) on the voyage. And the voyage lasted six months, from 25 August 1809 to 27 February 1810. They were greeted on their arrival with the news of the Boyd massacre. Kendall and his wife and family were comparatively lucky. Their ship was a transport, and the voyage to Port Jackson was one of only four and a half months. When at last they left the comparative familiarity and civilisation of New South Wales, thenceforth to be the nearest place to them peopled by men and women of their own race, the journey occupied four weeks and five days. Kendall and Hall had already paid a brief visit of five or six weeks to the Bay earlier in the year; and all had made the acquaintance of a few Maoris, who had been at the school established for them by Marsden at Parramatta. The chief Ruatara had in fact travelled from England with Marsden and the Halls and King; and had like them been obliged to remain in New South Wales for some considerable period, owing to the refusal of shipmasters to make the voyage to New Zealand. And Hongi the powerful had with four others, one of whom was Ruatara, been a passenger with them from Sydney in the Active. It must, nevertheless, have been strange and alarming enough to be set down in a country inhabited by a little-known race, stories of whose warlike and cannibalistic customs they had heard in plenty, and to be entirely dependent on their goodwill for the safety—comfort was at first out of the question—of themselves and their families. It is not possible to know what were the feelings of those women
Mrs Hansen, wife of the master of the Active, remained with her young son at the Bay with the missionaries, her husband proposing to join her later.
when they landed on the beach that day in December 1814; it is not possible adequately to imagine them.
Only by reading the letters and journals of their husbands can we form a guess at the sort of lives they had to lead. At first and for some months at least, they lived in huts put up for them by the Maoris—huts made of raupo, without flooring, chimney or window, and neither wind-proof nor rain-proof. These were perhaps all that was necessary while the weather was fine; but the early part of 1815 seems to have brought rain, and when it rained nothing could be kept dry—the water on the 'dirt floor' was 'half over' their shoes; food, bedding and clothes alike suffered; and while the wet weather lasted they had simply to endure, as best they might, damp clothes and bedding; they could have no fires in their huts, and the out-door fires were inadequate to the situation. It was bad enough for all; for Mrs King, whose second son was born on 20 February, it was particularly hard, and her husband seems to have been alarmed for her and to have complained to Marsden a few days before the event of the conditions under which his wife was forced to live. It is not easy to see what could have been done immediately to improve matters, and Marsden's reception of King's complaints was evidently unsympathetic. 'He says,' wrote King on 15 February, when it had been raining for three days, and speaking of their dripping hut, 'he says it is very comfortable indeed; it will do very well.' That the 'fine boy' (Marsden's description) born five days later died at the age of three and a half 'of a consumption' is hardly surprising.
It was, of course, not intended that the raupo huts should be permanent residences, and as the settlement progressed the missionaries and their families were able to live in comparative comfort. 'We expect,' King said in the same letter, 'to have a good house before long, but I fear not before winter.' It was not an easy situation. Timber, plentiful enough in many parts of the Bay, but not in that in which the missionaries first settled, had to be bought standing, felled, conveyed a matter of twenty miles to the site chosen, and sawn, before building could be begun. Hall was the only man among them with expert knowledge of all the processes involved; and although in these first days the little community included seven or eight other white men, one of whom was a smith and two were sawyers, the difficulties were immense. Everything was to be done. Not only had houses to be built; ground had to be prepared and wheat and vegetables grown. And Marsden, whose dream the mission had been for so many years, was perhaps a little impatient that its work should be begun. His comment on King's leaking hut would seem to suggest it, and so does the fact that a school had been started in Kendall's 'house' even before Marsden left New Zealand in February 1815, that is, during the first eight weeks of the settlement. So that the already great difficulties were increased by the impossibility of the men's giving their whole time to one piece of work, and the women must have suffered in consequence.
The choice of Rangihoua for the establishment of the first settlement was Marsden's. Eager to see the work of the mission begun, he refused to regard the disadvantages to his 'lieutenants' and their families of settling in a place comparatively unproductive and barren of timber. At Rangihoua they would be under Ruatara's protection, his people seemed pleased to have them, and there were many children for Kendall's school. The objections of the missionary-settlers were over-ruled. But Ruatara died a few days after Marsden sailed for Sydney; and the missionaries took advantage of the excuse which this afforded them of the loss of his personal protection to buy a piece of land which seemed to them more suitable than Marsden's choice, and an attempt was made to form a settlement at Paihia. Timber was felled and sawn, buildings were begun, and the sawyer engaged in the work, with his wife and child,
The wives and children of the smith and one sawyer (the other was a single man) had been sent over by Marsden on his return to New South Wales; so that there were now six white women in the settlement.
were to be joined by Hall and his family as soon as their house was up. But before the plan could be carried out, the sawyer's house was attacked and plundered by Maoris, and the inmates threatened with death. The Rangihoua natives, who had opposed the move to Paihia, were delighted, feeling that this set-back would make the white men less inclined to leave them. It was enough for Kendall; but Hall (probably influenced by the increasing personal difficulties at Rangihoua) and the sawyers started work again. By September 1815 they had things well enough advanced for Hall to remove his family to the new settlement, this time at Waitangi, a few miles north of Paihia. The ground was level and exceedingly fertile, and before long, in spite of a lack of tools, it was producing wheat and barley and 'almost every useful kitchen vegetable in the highest state of perfection.' This promising settlement had also, however, to be abandoned. When the Halls had been there about four months, in January 1816, they were attacked, during the absence of the friendly natives under whose protection they lived, by a party of strangers. Hall was seized and thrown to the ground, and Mrs Hall, running to him, was struck in the face and knocked down, where she lay, her face streaming blood, until their friends heard the alarm and drove the attacking party away. It was a sad disappointment. They were obliged to return to Rangihoua, where the Kendalls and the Kings had already reached a point at which they had as little as possible to do with one another. Kendall seems to have been the chief trouble-maker, though it was long before Marsden could be brought to find any fault in him. He felt himself, an educated man, schoolmaster as he had been and magistrate as he had now been appointed, to be superior to his colleagues, the artisan missionaries; and he made them and their wives feel it in ways that must have been exasperating. He belittled them to the natives, with whom his prestige was already greater than theirs (a fact which they on their side resented) owing to his really considerable gifts as a linguist, and spoke ill of them to the captains of visiting ships. The other Europeans too were inevitably involved, some taking the side of one party, some of the other. It was altogether an uncomfortable state of affairs, for which probably no member of the little community was entirely blameless. The Kings and the Halls were certainly united in their feelings against the Kendalls, and there does not appear to be any evidence of dissension between these two families at least. Indeed the Kings did all they could to help the others when they were driven from Waitangi, and 'I hope,' Hall wrote to the Church Missionary Society, 'I shall never forget the kindness of that man and his family towards us.' King assisted in the removal to Rangihoua of what remained of the Halls' property after the marauding natives had been driven away. But they could not do very much more for them; and the Halls had to return to discomforts even greater than those they had all endured at the beginning. Until their Waitangi house could be brought over and rebuilt, they had to live in a small and far from weather-proof hut, without a fireplace, and they had been robbed of all their bedding, their clothes, cooking utensils and fire-irons, while Hall had lost, besides, his axe and many of his carpenter's tools, as well as his guns. The winter was cold and wet; and his work on his house was hampered, not only by the weather, but by Kendall's demands upon his time and labour for the building of his dwelling and school-house. For thirteen miserable weeks they had to make shift in the dark, draughty and leaking hut.
On the whole the relations between these earliest settlers and the Maoris were good. The Maoris were quick to see the advantage that might be gained by having among them people of a more advanced civilisation than their own; they were eager to obtain the axes and other implements that the white men used and would barter for food, timber and other requirements; and the smith was kept always busily at work. But there were inevitable difficulties. The settlers very soon came to the conclusion that, poor in worldly goods as they might be considered by ordinary standards, they were yet too wealthy for their situation. For the Maoris, as Kendall reported, could not 'bear to see property before their eyes without coveting it.' And they did not stop at coveting. For many years there were not infrequent clashes owing to the natives' pilfering habits; and the women had sometimes, in the absence of their husbands, to face angry and threatening demands for blankets or tools. To maintain the calm and apparently unmoved bearing to which the Maori was so quickly responsive, in the sight of a naked and painted warrior brandishing his weapon as he climbed your fence or pushed his way into your unprotected house, can have been no easy matter, even when you knew from experience that it was the safest way. But there are many recorded instances of such occurrences and of such displays of courage by the women. All had constantly to be on their guard too lest they should offend against the ancient customs of the Maoris, which it necessarily took time to learn; though as far as one can learn the Maoris seem on the whole to have been very forbearing in this matter.
Food of sorts was in the quite early days in fairly plentiful supply. Pork was the staple meat diet, varied with wild pigeons and ducks, and with fish. With these earliest families in the Active had been brought, besides a stallion and two mares, 'one bull, and two cows … a few sheep and poultry of different kinds.' Whether these were intended for the use of the settlement or as presents for the Maoris I am uncertain. It was probably the latter. But in any case there was little time at first for systematic farming, and it was not for years that even an occasional supply of beef or mutton could be had by an organised hunt for the creatures that had necessarily run wild in the bush. Except for the Halls' brief time of plenty at Waitangi, vegetables seem to have been confined mainly to potatoes and kumara. Flour, until substantial crops of wheat could be produced, was procured from Sydney, or from visiting whalers and other ships; so too were rice, sugar and tea. Fern-root was a substitute for bread; but even the Maoris preferred bread when they could get it. Milk and fresh butter they cannot have had until they had time and opportunity to look after such cattle as they were sent.
Cooking was generally difficult. If they wanted chimneys they must first make bricks; and cooking was for long done out of doors. Even in good weather dry wood was probably not always easy to obtain; in cold, windy or wet weather, the cook's sufferings must have been extreme, and she would have no substitutes to offer—no fruit nor vegetables, often no bread; the meal must be cooked, or men, women and children must go hungry. When it is considered that these women had not only their own families to provide for, but frequently large numbers of natives as well, sometimes amounting to a score or more, who were variously employed about the settlement, it will seem even more remarkable that they found time and energy for other occupations.
Yet this they must do. It was part of their undertaking to the C.M.S. that wives, and children as soon as they were of an age to be useful, should be employed in the interests of the mission. And these women had Maori girls in their houses 'to instruct in writing, sewing, making any sort of clothing, to knit and spin … to wash and cook and clean the house.' 'These things,' one of the husbands wrote of his wife, 'she will do with pleasure provided the means are put into our power. Those children will need food and clothing, and some little things besides to encourage them, such as a knife, scissors, comb, nails, chisels, small hatchet, plane-irons' (he is speaking now of the boys he was intending to teach 'to spin [twine] and to make shoes, to read and do anything else that may be useful') 'files, fish-hooks, etc. One of these articles would satisfy one of them for a week, sometimes for two weeks….'
Clothing for these children they expected to get either from Sydney or from England; and as long as their teachers were able to provide clothing and food, there was little difficulty in obtaining pupils, although discipline was unknown and the children were apt to be withdrawn by their parents on the least pretext—to help with the gathering of fern-root, with the fishing, the preparation of the ground for kumara, or other of their pursuits. Kendall reports that they were sometimes obliged to follow their pupils into the bush. 'They are so very lively and playful,' he adds, 'that it is not easy to hold their attention.'
Generally speaking, lessons were given to the Maori children in the morning and the evening, the middle part of the day being devoted to the white children. Marsden had seen to it that school work began within the first few weeks; but after his departure, Kendall found it impossible to carry on with any regularity. In fact Hall, writing in January 1816, reports that the 'school' was 'dispersed' as soon as Marsden left and had not at that date been restarted. In August of that year, however, the first school-house in New Zealand was opened with thirty-three pupils, a number which had risen to seventy within the next few months, and remained at that for about three years, the ages of the children, half of them boys and half girls, ranging from seven to seventeen. As long as food was plentiful, the plan worked fairly well, though with the multifarious employments that must occupy the daylight hours of the teachers, we may suppose the schooling provided for the pakeha children to have been scanty.
As time went on, however, the Maoris grew more and more anxious to obtain the muskets and powder in which the mission was forbidden to trade, but which could be obtained from the whalers and from other vessels putting into the Bay to refit and provision. The number of these constantly grew, so that even if the Maoris would have traded with the settlers, they could not always do so. The Bay was sometimes 'thin of pork'. Timber, labour, pork and potatoes became in consequence increasingly difficult to obtain. Not only did the settlers find it often impossible to collect the supplies of pork, fish, flax and spars with which Marsden expected the Active to be loaded on each return trip from the Bay to Sydney; they were frequently themselves obliged to go short. And the children would not stay in the school or the houses unless they were fed. Stinted for provisions for themselves and hampered in their work of settlement and as 'schoolmasters and catechists'—the situation was disheartening. Small wonder that there was evidence of frayed nerves, and that there was occasional and increasing falling from grace in the matter of muskets and powder.
* It happened also more than once that the houses of the mission settlement were attacked, because, either through inability or unwillingness, the desired muskets were not supplied.
These were extraordinarily courageous men and women; they were not saints.
Meanwhile the white population of the Bay, even apart from the grog-shop proprietors, deserting sailors, ex-convicts and general riff-raff who congregated mainly at Kororareka, was increasing. The original mission-settlers' families grew in size, and they were joined by others, some like themselves under the C.M.S., others to establish a Wesleyan mission. The ranks of the women in New Zealand were swelling. Mr and Mrs Carlisle and Mr and Mrs Gordon came in 1817; the Butlers, the Kemps and the Puckeys arrived in 1819; the Shepherds in 1820; the Leighs in 1822; in 1823 Mr and Mrs Henry Williams, Mr and Mrs Fairburn, and Mr and Mrs Turner joined the two missions, and young Samuel Butler brought a wife to Kerikeri from Port Jackson; and the Clarkes and the Davises came in 1824, the tenth year of missionary work in New Zealand. There may have been others during this first decade whose names are not recorded: there certainly were other men, but mention of their wives has not been found. Not all of these remained—the Carlisles, the Gordons, the Kendalls and the Butlers, for example, had all left before the end of 1824. But in spite of defections and dismissals, the number of settlers steadily increased; and besides the members of the two missions, there were others, who were engaged in trade of various kinds, and their wives and families. As the numbers increased, so did the scope of the work. The Wesleyans went to Whangaroa, while the Church Missionary Society spread first to Kerikeri, and then to Paihia. There must have been some comfort in this growth of the more respectable part of the settled population. Still, however, the several little communities, though all except the Wesleyan station were for long within the Bay of Islands, were widely enough separated. The Maoris, whose quick intelligence had noted the internal dissensions of the mission, and in certain notorious cases the inconsistencies between preaching and practice, presented still as many difficulties as at first—more indeed, for their desire for the forbidden muskets and powder was greater than ever, and the observed weakness of some of the settlers led to an increased insolence and violence. Not the women only were at times reduced to tears. And as the new settlements were formed, the earliest conditions were in large measure reproduced; and the later arrivals had dangers and difficulties to endure almost as great as those of the pioneers of 1814. For creature comforts they were something better situated. The Butlers, for instance, had in 1821, eighteen months after their arrival, an excellent vegetable garden and 'a pretty good stock of young fruit-trees', and they were also milking their cows. And Mrs Henry Williams comments in her journal on the goats and fowls that she found awaiting her at Paihia. To a certain extent material comfort now rested with the individual. The Butlers had settled at Kerikeri, and lived at first in the building intended for the storehouse. They had two rooms, about fourteen by ten, and eight foot high, according to Hall, with floors, and 'glazed sashes hung with hinges', and 'a detached kitchen, with enclosed fowlyards, pigsty, and every other convenience.' But they felt themselves exceedingly ill-used, 'saying they lived in a pigsty, and that everyone could get a house but them, and that nobody had been so ill off at New Zealand as they had been.' Hall was, not unnaturally, unsympathetic. The truth was that Butler's ideas were a deal too big for the position; and the house he wanted, still according to Hall, admittedly rather a hostile witness, was of a size and grandeur quite unsuited to the conditions of life at the Bay. Hall, the carpenter, would give little help; there were other things for him to do that he felt to be more important; and Butler had to turn to himself, and carry out plans more modest, necessarily neglecting meanwhile his more specifically missionary duties to an extent which apparently brought some protest from the Committee.
The Henry Williamses on the other hand were content to live for seven years in their raupo hut. In the Journal of 1830, under date 20 April, Marsden, who was at the Paihia settlement, wrote: 'I have been very unwell today, having got a severe cold in the night attended with a sore throat owing to sleeping in a room open to the wind and rain. All the clergy are miserably accommodated as to their houses. They are about building some now. What they have are as bad as cowsheds. They have been exceedingly inattentive to their own comforts in these respects.' The Williams hut, however, was obviously larger and more comfortable than those first occupied by the three pioneer families. Mrs Williams describes it as she found it on her arrival at Paihia. 'The entrance … was dark, and within were two rooms with no floors, and boards nailed up where sashlights are to be placed.' But a boarded floor was laid in the bedroom before night, 'and I never reposed more comfortably.' "On Sunday,' she goes on, 'Mr Williams opened another raupo hut for a chapel.'
In fact Henry Williams was the man the settlement needed. Before taking orders and joining the mission, he had served in the Navy; he was a disciplinarian, a man of immense energy, sparing neither himself nor others. His convictions were absolute, and nothing, neither considerations of personal safety or comfort, nor differences of opinion with his colleagues, even with Marsden, was allowed to stand in the way of what he saw as his duty. Ultimately this worked untold good to the mission, and was perhaps the greatest single factor in preparing the way for colonisation. But it bore hardly at times upon his wife, though one gathers that she would not have had him at all different.
Resolutely he set his face against the trade in muskets. 'Not long ago,' Mrs Williams wrote, 'we heard that thirty pigs were brought down the river to exchange for muskets. The captain had so much pork that he refused to buy, and they were all taken back again. We had lived upon salt beef from Sydney for three weeks, and fish when time could be spared to catch it.' Strengthened by the example of this natural leader, the other members of the mission grew equally firm; and before very long it was evident that this consistent refusal was all that had been necessary. The Maoris at length accepted the situation, and gave up demanding firearms from the mission. This matter of muskets and powder had been one of the chief causes of trouble and dissension among the settlers themselves. By 1827 Marsden was able to rejoice, after all the wretchedness of spirit that the mission had caused him, that he now at last found them 'living in unity and godly love'.
With equal firmness, Williams stood out for his rights and those of his colleagues when subjected by the Maoris to what he considered unfair treatment. One of the carpenters employed at Paihia gave great, and as was admitted just, offence by swearing when his tool-chest was upset by the chief Te Koki. As a result, the carpenter having no possessions of his own, the settlement suffered a raid. Everything was taken that the Maoris could get their hands on, and blood was shed. Williams, while he admitted that the carpenter had been at fault, demanded for his own household restitution and compensation. He summoned his colleagues from Rangihoua and Kerikeri (and his wife and children were left unprotected at Paihia meanwhile, for there was no means of delivering the summons but in person); and together they met the chiefs. Williams declared his intention of moving from Paihia if his demands were not met, and impressed the Maoris with the sincerity of his words. 'The prospect' commented his wife, 'of toiling another twelve-month in the bush, and being no forwarder than we were at present, seemed very formidable to me', and her suspense was great. Fortunately, however, her husband's firmness had the desired effect; his wishes were obeyed, and the best of relations were restored. Williams's complete fearlessness and obvious determination on all such occasions quickly won the respect of the Maoris, where increasing distrust and scorn had been the result of the weak tears and violent tempers of earlier mission leaders.
In this instance there was obviously some fault on the part of one of the Europeans. It was committed in ignorance—the carpenter had no intention of giving any real offence; but that did not lessen the offence in the eyes of the Maoris, who were equally ignorant of the innocence of the man's intention. Sometimes, however, there was not this justification for the sufferings brought by the natives upon the settlers. Throughout this early part of the century there was an even unusual amount of warfare amongst the tribes; and in 1827, in one of Hongi's wars, the Wesleyan mission at Whangaroa was attacked, plundered and burnt by a marauding party. The missionaries escaped with their lives, but they lost everything else. They made their way, men, women and children,
There were three women in the party, one of whom was still weak after the birth of her baby, and another had been for some time 'extremely ill, and was hardly able to move at all.' The third was a visitor from the C.M.S. station at Paihia. Some of the hills on their route were so steep that 'but for the roots of trees', which formed 'a sort of steps, they would be almost inaccessible.' James Stack had somehow managed, travelling all night, to get through ahead to Kerikeri with the news of the disaster.
as best they could, over 'twenty roadless miles' to the C.M.S. station at Kerikeri. George Clarke remembered being carried as a small child on his nurse's back, 'and crossing the river to meet the jaded and fugitive travellers, and bring them to our house. What struck me most was Mrs Turner … with bare and bleeding feet, and but poorly and shiveringly clad.' Mrs Turner was carrying one of her three young children, a baby five weeks old. The Kerikeri natives were afraid to allow them to remain there, knowing that to shelter them would expose themselves and the Europeans as well to danger. The Williamses therefore brought them, and the women and children of the Kerikeri station, to Paihia. 'I remember,' wrote George Clarke, 'a time between midnight and morning, being lifted out of my cot and told to be very still. In the dim light of a lantern I saw my poor mother enveloped in a cloak, and quietly sobbing, then father wrapping me in a thick blanket, and taking me in his arms, they crept stealthily out of the house and made their way in the starlight to a boat, with muffled oars, under the rock. Mother and I and baby Sam, were deposited in the sternsheets, and we glided silently to the entrance, and passed the sleeping pah.'
The next few days were ones of continual anxiety, as reports, frequently conflicting, came in of the movements of Hongi and of his adversaries. The missionaries were anxious to stay at their posts, but recognised now, as they had not done before, to what dangers they were exposed from plundering parties of warriors, and they felt that they must be prepared to leave. The Sisters was in the harbour, ready to sail for Sydney, and passages were taken aboard her for the Turner family. 'Rose at daylight,' is the entry in Mrs Williams's diary for 15 January, 'to pack box after box, and case after case: a great fatigue.' Still the conflicting tales were brought in. On 18 January 'a part of the floor was taken up to bury some linen, clothes laid ready to be put on, etc.', and next day, 'we cling to the hope of weathering the storm, and being able to stay. We have shipping in the harbour to flee to, in case of necessity.' In a few days the crisis, however, was over; the women and children from Kerikeri were able to return to their homes, and the following weeks were weeks of delight to the children as 'the disinterring of hidden treasures' took place.
This sort of thing did not, of course, happen every day, but it was liable to happen any time in those years of acute restlessness among the Maoris. Gradually their confidence in the missionaries and in the justice of their dealings increased so greatly that they took to seeking their help as mediators in their numerous quarrels. And from this time onward, until 1840 and even later, a new care and anxiety was added to those the missionary women already had in abundance. Their husbands were now frequently absent with the Maori armies for weeks at a time; and 'you,' Mrs Williams wrote, 'who live in favoured England, the land of roads, and coaches, and posts, know not what it is either to say "good-bye" or "how-do-you-do?" Your post office preserves you from the feeling of separation which a journey in New Zealand occasions.'
If there were fighting at all near at hand, the care of the sick and the wounded became a part of the women's duty. Writing to her sister on 20 March 1830 Mrs Williams says:
'A most eventful month has passed; I think a journal of it would afford quite a new interest; but so constant has been the excitement, so crowded the incidents, and so great the bodily exertion, both of the Missionaries abroad, and their wives at home, that nobody has written at all…. It is a fortnight today since the day of the bloodshed at Kororareka— just on the opposite side of the bay—all in view, and within hearing from our settlement. The women and children fled in their canoes to this beach for refuge, and the wounded came here to be dressed. Magnified reports were brought of the really many slain, and to increase our agitation, Henry started as soon as he discerned by his glass the state of things, and landed amidst the balls flying; he had, with William, Mr Davis, and Mr Brown, spent the whole of the preceding day persuading the parties to peace, and had, they thought, succeeded. On this occasion we all thought him rash; but Henry thought himself in the way of duty. He was preserved and certainly did much towards stopping the firing…. Since this day our beach has been a most busy scene. We have had no quiet.'
Small wonder that this woman's husband wrote of her, ten or eleven years later, when she was yet only in her forties, 'My wife begins to flag. She gets older every day.' Throughout her diary and letters there constantly recur such statements as: 'Henry saw a movement among the canoes; was off and up the river in his dressing-gown before we knew he was gone.' 'Henry was off before the breakfast bell rang; I had terror and anxiety to endure again.' 'Henry moved off between 5 and 6 without waiting for a cup of tea. I was all anxiety.' On the longer peace-making expeditions there were all the dangers of the sea in small vessels to be faced as well; and on at least one occasion Henry Williams was saved from shipwreck, on a coast where none could have survived it, by what seemed to him, old sailor as he was, hardly short of a miracle.
Throughout all these alarms and terrors, and in spite of the extra burdens imposed by them, the women kept up their work in the schools. There were schools for Maoris wherever the missions settled, and in addition some conducted by native teachers which the missionaries superintended, and visited for examination purposes. Besides these there were a boys' and a girls' school for Europeans, the latter, for the girls of the mission settlements, being the responsibility of Mrs Henry Williams. She was in charge for twenty years, during ten of which she had assistance—for eight years that of her sister-in-law Mrs William Williams, and for two of Mrs Ashwell. At the end of that time her husband insisted on her giving up this part of her work. 'It is heavy work,' he said, 'without English servants.' But her work among the Maoris she never relaxed to the end of her life, and she lived to be eighty-five.
Writing in the early days of her New Zealand life, she gives an idea of what being 'without English servants' meant. 'The missionary's wife must, for the sake of cleanliness and preservation from multitudes of fleas, wash and dress her children, make her own bed, her children's and her "visitors'." She must be housemaid and chambermaid and nurserymaid, and must superintend the cooking; for the best of the native girls would, if she were not watched, strain the milk with the duster, wash the tea things with the house-cloth, or wipe the tables with the flannel for scouring the floor. The very best of them also will on a hot day take herself off, just when you may be longing for someone to hold the baby, and swim; after which she will go to sleep for two or three hours.' Let it be remembered that 'the cooking' was not a matter of cooking for an ordinary household in a civilised country. There were ultimately eleven children of her own house; frequently there were visiting Europeans (missionaries, ships' officers, other settlers from across the Bay) as well as numerous natives, to be provided for. In times of disturbance these numbers were greatly increased. On one occasion Mrs Williams notes that 'about sixty pots of rice were given out' and that 'our two breakfasts and numerous visitors occupied much time', and on another, 'Hone Heke and his party, to eat twenty pots of stirabout.' Even in more peaceful times 'superintending' the cooking must have been no sinecure. When in 1842 Bishop Selwyn arrived unexpectedly, he 'seemed surprised at the long tea-table of the two families of Williams, set for twenty-four.' To add to the arduousness of the position, these women could seldom know when to expect their visitors. The difficulties of the later missionary wives were in some respects different from those of the settlers of 1814—they were hardly less.
More and more the Maoris turned to such men and to such women, relying on them in sickness and in health—teachers, counsellors, housekeepers on a gigantic scale, 'fathers' and 'mothers' to hundreds besides their own large families, nurses and amateur doctors. They were a source of strength and comfort too to many among the more orderly and less law-defiant of the white population outside the missions, whose numbers rapidly increased in the last decade before Waitangi. It was to them that Busby constantly turned in all the overwhelming difficulties of his position; it was Mrs Williams who was with Mrs Busby at the birth of her first child soon after their arrival at Waitangi; and the Williamses, husband and wife, who went to their assistance when, thirty-six hours later, the Residency was mysteriously attacked, and who remained with them until danger seemed to be past.
There was more coming and going, both of Maori and pakeha, in the Bay than in the laterestablished mission settlements, and a greater consequent strain upon the housekeeper. There was also, however, more comfort and convenience. Mrs Robert Maunsell, who arrived with her husband and landed at Paihia in November 1835, was able to say a week later in writing to a friend: 'My expectations of the trials [of a missionary life] are much disappointed and my anticipations of its pleasures more than realized.' She described the Williams house as 'a pretty cottage, a verandah in front through the trellis-work of which woodbines and roses most luxuriantly twine. What we consider beautiful roses in England grow here almost as weeds. There is a large garden in front, out-building and orchard at back.' The Maunsells were occupying the house recently vacated by the William Williams family, 'two storeys high, built also entirely with the hands of its former occupant. 'I am as happy as I can be,' she went on, 'my health quite good, and enjoying innumerable comforts…. the choicest fruits and vegetables grow here in abundance. Peaches by loads, quinces, apples, mulberries, greens, asparagus, cauliflowers, etc., etc.'
By this time, however, requests for teachers and ministers were coming from the Maoris in many parts of the North Island; and more men and women were arriving and new stations were being established in response. At each new station the men and women in charge had discomforts and difficulties to endure similar to those experienced by earlier arrivals. It is true that the settlements were being formed in reply to Maori requests; but the Maoris were not unanimous, and the missions were still liable to attack and plunder, the lives of the missionaries and their wives still frequently threatened. Even the desire for the presence of the white people had its drawbacks: many of the natives had never before seen white women, and their interest and curiosity were immense, and both embarrassing and exhausting. All day from the earliest hours until dark they crowded, chattering and exclaiming, round the door of the tent or hut, watching the bathing and feeding of the babies, commenting on every smallest action of the white woman within. There were inevitably too the same housing difficulties. The Maunsells, whose experience is typical, lived at Mokatoa (Manukau harbour) for eighteen months or more in a raupo whare; the Stacks, father, mother and five children, for two years at East Cape in a three-roomed cottage, 'consisting of a wooden frame covered with sailcloth.' It was in one sense a simple life, and most of these earliest settlers in New Zealand seem to have been very healthy; and the children brought up in circumstances that at first sight seem so adverse— the 'houses' overcrowded, ill-ventilated, damp and draughty; the diet, at least until each station was well-established, very limited and not what we have come to regard as entirely suitable—lived in most instances to be very old men and women. We may suppose that all, parents and children alike, spent in the circumstances much time out of doors, and that the babies really had a better start in life than many a modern child. There were after all no towns; these were all necessarily country children. And as the stations became established the occupants lived, as one of the Maunsell daughters put it in later life, in 'a land flowing with milk and honey. We had rows of beehives, and a superabundance of milk which we used to mix with our bread. Of fish and fruit we had an abundance, and the pigs were sometimes fed on the huge ripe peaches.' After the first decade there is little mention of infant mortality, and very little of sickness, other than that incidental to child-bearing, among the elders. In the earliest days no medical assistance of any kind was to be had;
The Rev. William Williams, who arrived in the Bay of Islands in 1826, had studied medicine, and was able to be of considerable help to those, both Maori and pakeha, among whom he settled.
and even when later on a mission doctor was appointed, the distances between the stations and the difficulties of communication, through virgin bush, across rivers and treacherous swamps, militated seriously against his possible usefulness. Any desire for help necessitated a hard journey, often on foot, of days or weeks. Maunsell's first wife, who had never been strong, broke down under the strain of mission life, and was for months unable to walk from her bedroom, and sometimes could 'scarcely sit upright' in her bed for as much as half an hour. This was at Maraetai (Port Waikato), where they were living in 'a rush hut, with an earthen floor and only one door,' and for window 'a hole in the wall,' into which, in wet weather, 'a bag of soiled clothes' had to be thrust to keep out the rain. Here Maunsell worked at his translation of the Bible, sitting in a room next to where his wife lay ill, listening 'through the rush partition' 'for the sounds of her fainting,' so that he might hasten to give her medicine. Despite these apparently overwhelming odds, however, Mrs Maunsell recovered sufficiently to be three years later 'a wonder to herself,' and to be able, as she wrote, 'to take a walk a mile or two to superintend my native school, evening meetings, etc., as well as to attend to the ordinary affairs of my family.' She now had four sons, the youngest just a year old; but she had also the assistance of a young friend, Miss Rymill, who had come out from England to be with her. But there were further trials in store. They had moved into their new board house only three weeks when it was burned to the ground and they lost nearly 'all the comforts they had been gathering during the past eight years.' Mrs Maunsell had been a complete invalid for many weeks. She was carried to the carpenter's hut, where 'a bed of fern and tussock grass' was made for her, 'and before daybreak a little daughter was born.' This shelter they had but a fortnight when it too was burned down, and now there remained for them nothing better than 'a tumble-down native house, willingly given up by its occupant.' The nearest mission station was twenty-five miles distant, and to it a messenger had to be sent for provisions and medicines.
Yet four years later Mrs Maunsell could write: 'I am very happy, and would not exchange my lot with anyone on earth.'
This spirit carried her through another four years, when she died at the age of only thirty-seven.
The experience of these people was perhaps unusually unfortunate; but it was one to which all were constantly liable.
On the best showing and whatever its compensations, it was a hard way of life that these women trod. Those on the later stations were sometimes years without sight of or speech with another white woman. 'My dear mother,' wrote Canon Stack, '… had not spoken to or seen a white woman for more than three years.' Without medical aid or adequate nursing, they bore their children, sometimes on beds of fern and in villages whose inhabitants had hardly yet turned from cannibalism. They exchanged their sheltered English homes for makeshift dwellings in a strange wild land; and not isolation, nor danger, nor anxiety, nor pain, not even the canker of inescapable daily discomfort could conquer the pity that brought them, and the love that kept them here. They had the inspiration of working for an end that they believed to be great and good; they had the pleasure as well as the pain of fighting against odds; they shared the work, the pleasure and the pain in fullest measure with their men; and gradually they saw the small buds of hope turn to blossom and to fruit. But in any effort to keep pace with the calls upon their courage and endurance, imagination is left standing.
2The Voyage
Plans For the regular settlement of New Zealand were formed long before the British Government had made up its mind what course to pursue; they were, in fact, not only formed, but begun to be executed; and the New Zealand Company's first settlers had landed in Port Nicholson a week or two before the first signatures were set to the Treaty of Waitangi. The story of the various New Zealand Associations belongs elsewhere. It is enough to state here that the Company's action in despatching its ships, under the enthusiastic and vigorous direction of Wakefield, finally forced the Government's hand, and emigration to the new colony was able to proceed rapidly.
Every inducement was offered to men and women of particular types and callings to cross those wide seas. A New Zealand Journal, appearing fortnightly, was published in London, the first number being issued on 8 February 1840. It contained such things as reports of colonisation societies co-operating in various districts with the main Company; reviews of books dealing with colonisation, with special reference to New Zealand; an analysis of the passenger-lists of the first ships that had left for the colony; accounts of the steps taken to ensure the well-being and progress of those going out; correspondence on relevant matters; advertisements regarding the Company's scheme for granting free or assisted passages to suitable emigrants, with advice in later issues as to the equipment necessary for the voyage, and the dietary provided; and in time extracts from letters and journals of emigrants of all classes already arrived in New Zealand. No doubt a certain amount was showmanship; yet it is impossible not to feel, even now after the lapse of a hundred years, the pressure of the excitement and hope of those who were responsible for the Journal.
Conditions in England were bad. Wages were low, employment difficult to obtain; the Company pushed its wares well, and there was a ready response. Already in the last months of 1839 over seven hundred men and women had left England for New Zealand, with close on four hundred children; and the stream flowed steadily for many years. It would be a wholesome exercise for us in these later days, reluctant travellers as we sometimes are, if we could even see the ships in which they sailed and the quarters that they occupied, remembering that the voyage was unlikely to be of less than four months' duration, very likely to be longer, and did occasionally take as long as nine months. The discomforts would not appear to them perhaps, who had known no other standard of voyaging, so great as to us; but they must, nevertheless, have been extreme; and those who know to how weary a length five weeks can draw themselves out, and how easy it is to become hypercritical of the appearance and behaviour of one's fellow-passengers, will find no cause for surprise in the fact that in the long confinement and close quarters of these small ships irritation frequently spilled over into quarrelling and violence. One of the Company's first New Zealand bound ships had to put into Capetown in order to settle the differences among passengers and between passengers and captain. The captain himself was by no means always blameless, and against him there was during the voyage no appeal. An article in an early number of the Journal warns intending emigrants that 'the captain is a despot and should be obeyed. If he misuse his power on board, yield while under his control, even if you complain on reaching your destination.' There was, as we may suppose, little enough consolation in the prospect.
Passengers had to supply themselves with almost everything they might need to use on the voyage, even to the cabin furnishings. In a few ships, 'it sometimes happens' according to a Handbook published in 1849, 'that the bed-places are already fixed, but this is only in the poop: to secure these, an early application is necessary.' By this date also the Company was providing for steerage passengers mattresses, bolsters, and cooking utensils; they still had to find their own blankets, sheets and towels, together with knives and forks, spoons, plates and drinking vessels. First class, or 'cabin', passengers had their food cooked and served to them 'as it would be at the table of an hotel, all necessary attendance being included.' All others had to do their own cooking; and both the 'second-cabin' or 'intermediate' passengers and those in the steerage generally made an arrangement with one or more of their own class to act as 'messmen' for a given period, a week, a month, or even for the whole voyage. If no intermediate passenger were willing to serve in this way, there would probably always be an assisted emigrant glad enough to earn a few pounds by cooking for the 'second-cabin'; but passengers in this class had to provide for themselves 'a can, to hold the supply of water, a wash basin, baking dish, tin pot, drinking can, tin plate, tea-pot, spoon, knife and fork for each individual', and an 'oval pot and teakettle for the mess.' A mess consisted of six or more persons, and the food, provided by the Company, was issued, in some ships daily, in others on three days a week, and cooked in the ship's galley at strictly regulated times, the firing being found at the ship's expense.
A certain amount of live stock (sheep, pigs and poultry) was carried, and the cabin passengers, but they alone, were able to have fresh meat during a great part of the voyage. Indeed they fared remarkably well. A lively diarist, travelling out 'cabin' in 1842, remarks that at sea people 'appear to like, at all events they load their stomachs with, the most incongruous mixtures. At dinner, for instance, after rich pork, they will take roast duck with boiled ham, currant jelly and perhaps pickles, with boiled fowl, currant jelly and caper sauce; or roast mutton with tongue and pickles, plum jam; to say nothing of several sorts of stale vegetables, etc…. Rich tart or plum pudding, often a plate full of both, follow these simples, which just leave a corner in the stomach for a piece of new bread and strong cheese, thus preparing a foundation for rather a larger plate full of almonds and raisins or other dessert, than economical ladies would put upon table for a party of at any rate 4 or 5 people.' A dinner of this sort, the writer declares, has often been preceded by 'a 9 o'clock breakfast consisting of something like a pound of rich salmon immersed in butter, ham, five hot rolls, a plateful or two of boiled rice smothered with marmalade; to say nothing of a slight noontide refection of bread and cheese, Brandy, Port wine and Porter.' As he adds, 'It really is not surprising that people feel queerish at sea when several weeks have been passed on the water.'
On a long voyage food is still in our own days of rapid and comfortable travel apt to bulk disproportionately large in the interests of people normally quite abstemious—we need not think too hardly of these unfortunates. There were days then as now when it failed them. About three weeks out an entry in this diary reads: 'Dinner, pea soup; roast shoulder mutton, high; boiler pork, fat and high; bullock's tongue, salt and hard; cherry-pie, underbaked; green rhubarb pudding, insipid.' And even poultry palled. 'Had a piece of salt beef for dinner at the request of several, tired of fowls and ducks; it was horribly hard and salt.' Fresh vegetables would last only two or three weeks; after that they must put up with preserved carrots and preserved potatoes—'if obtainable.' Otherwise rice was used as a substitute. Passengers in this ship seem to have been lucky enough to have fresh bread; there was, it happened, a baker among the steerage passengers: the ship would not carry one. And for some unstated reason the captain gave orders after about seven weeks that no more bread was to be made. Ship's biscuit was provided on the scale of four pounds per week for each cabin passenger, three and a half pounds for the intermediates, five and a quarter in the steerage. It sounds a liberal supply, but it was not recommended by experienced travellers. A woman who had landed from the first ship in Wellington in writing to her parents advises that her brother should bring with him, among 'things of most consequence' for the voyage, 'a good barrel of flour, some potatoes, oatmeal, white biscuit—for the ship biscuit is very inferior … and when the appetite is sickly it will not take it.' This woman had evidently found the allowances of flour and of potatoes insufficient. The amount of these is not given in the early advertisements, nor is oatmeal mentioned; but our Handbook of 1849 gives one and three-quarter pounds of flour as the amount issued weekly for each adult steerage passenger (children between one and twelve half rations, infants under one year, none), which, as it had to serve for puddings as well as bread, where bread was possible, certainly does not seem excessive. By 1856 the Canterbury Association had increased the flour ration to three pounds, and one pint of oatmeal had been added earlier. The meat ('Prime India Beef, Prime Mess Pork, and Preserved Meat in succession'), three and a half pounds a week, was evidently found to be enough, since this quantity varies little. Want of appetite for this 'horribly hard and salt' fare may very well have had something to do with it. Rice, pease, raisins, suet, tea, coffee, sugar, butter, pickled cabbage, salt and mustard, and three quarts of water daily (three and a half for intermediate, four for cabin, passengers), complete the 'dietary.' Cheese, like fresh meat, was provided for cabin class only; and the Aurora's passenger already quoted advises her brother to bring some for himself, together with bacon, allspice, soda and tartaric acid. In most things the allowance for cabin and for intermediate passengers was larger than for those in the steerage, the exceptions being, besides 'biscuit', the various condiments, and butter, of which every adult passenger throughout the ship received half a pound weekly. As the butter was carried in kegs or barrels this would no doubt, and especially towards the end of the voyage, be enough.
Notwithstanding the fact that the Company prided itself on providing a dietary 'very much superior to what is usually within the emigrant's reach on shore,' it is not surprising that the fresh pork, pigeons, fish and potatoes in abundance that they were able to obtain when at so long last the voyage was over, made the earlier colonists exclaim, 'The country is like a paradise!' One family, landing in Lyttelton from the Sir George Seymour in December 1850, made straight for the baker's for fresh bread and butter, and ate the ambrosial stuff sitting on the rocks. 'We thought it the most delightful food, for we had had a hundred days' (but a brief hundred) 'of—and Co.'s contract feeding, which was something to be remembered.'
There can after all be little question that the quantity supplied was in the aggregate generally sufficient; but the Company might perhaps in addressing prospective steerage passengers have spared them its boast of 'variety'—'The very variety of the food, and the fact that the emigrants take their meals in messes of at least six persons, affords ample room for the management of a good housewife.' It might be interesting for some 'good housewife' to work out a set of menus, keeping strictly to the list provided, and see how great a variety she could introduce into her four or five months' meals. 'Management' seems in the circumstances to be the mot juste. The later ships sometimes carried a few cows by agreement with prospective farmers, the arrangement being that the milk should be given to the use of officers and passengers; but it is doubtful whether any found its way to the steerage, unless in the case of sickness.
Water must, of course, have been one of the chief difficulties in these little ships, and its use was strictly limited to drinking and cooking. 'Be sure,' a sister wrote to her brother, 'be sure you bring sea-soap, for you will not get fresh water to wash in.' It seems possible that the earliest emigrants were allowed to embark without a full understanding of this; and the Company found cause for complaint in the 'negligence of person almost universally conspicuous' amongst its assisted passengers, and was constrained to offer them some fatherly advice. 'Men neglect to shave themselves for days together.' But this even cabin passengers were sometimes obliged to do: with 'an ugly sea running,' it was 'much trouble to get dressed, washing and shaving not to be done.' Men would perhaps have done well on this count also to follow and improve upon the advice of an early Canterbury settler, who recommended 'every gentleman who comes out here to wear a moustache; all those who have not done so have suffered very much from sunburned lips.' Many did, in fact, as the diary of a woman cabin passenger records, 'discontinue the use of the razor' during the voyage. 'Women,' the Company's writer continued, 'to whom personal appearance is really important, neglect themselves even to a greater extent than the men. "Who is to see us?" is what passes in their minds continually. We answer, Your husbands; and perhaps an unknown lover, whose affections may be either weakened or lost by observing a constant carelessness of person on the part of the woman of his choice.' Sound, if fair-weather, counsel. Even in fair weather it can have been no easy matter for a woman to keep herself and possibly several small children clean and tidy, with cold salt water in a small hand-basin as her only aid. In bad weather, unless she were a good sailor, it was probably true that she neglected her appearance; it is likely that even the single woman, whose lot was in some respects easier, cared then not two straws for any impression she might make on an 'unknown lover.' It is to be remembered too that steerage passengers were responsible for the entire ordering of their crowded quarters: there were no stewards or stewardesses to make beds, sweep, dust, and wash the cabins. Mattresses were taken up to the deck for at least an occasional airing; and one woman complained that they got very dirty in the process, and advised her correspondents to provide themselves with strong covers to protect them. This again was possible only in good weather. If it were rough, men and women had enough to do preserving their belongings from total wreck. 'Anyone coming out must expect to have a good knocking about,' one wrote, 'as we were tossed about, first in a valley, then on a mountain. Some part of the time we were battened down, and the sea swamping over us by tons at a time, knocking all our things out of place, breaking crocks, upsetting our dinner and breakfast.' Cramped quarters ashore are difficult enough to deal with; at sea, when with every lurch of the ship 'all things animate and inanimate' were hurled about, children and chairs in terrifying and noisy confusion, neglect was surely excusable.
The steerage quarters were in three divisions—for married couples with their children under twelve years, for single men, and for single women. The married people had separate sleeping compartments: since space was extremely valuable they were very small, and ranged round the common saloon, if saloon it could be called. But the single men and the single women had their narrow beds (the mattresses were six feet by eighteen inches) in rows round the walls of their respective rooms, space enough being left in the middle for tables and benches, and the tables when not in use were hoisted to the ceiling. When the mattresses were on deck, the wooden slats which then took the place of the modern springs were taken out to be scrubbed, and occasionally whitewashed underneath. In very rough weather the water poured down the companions, even through closed hatches, and leaked through the deck. Men and women were kept busy with mops and cloths, and charcoal stoves had to be brought down to dry the beds. The galley fires were sometimes put out by a wave larger than the rest, and passengers felt themselves lucky enough if they managed to get their meals cooked even three or four hours late. It seems that there must have been many occasions when personal appearance might justifiably be considered of minor importance.
Personal clothes could be washed only when rain water was caught as it ran from the sails (for bedclothes salt water was deemed sufficient); and passengers were warned not to rely too much on such opportunities occurring. This meant, of course, that a larger wardrobe was required than is necessary in a modern ship. Evidently some of the earlier emigrants were ill-provided; and the Company within a few months issued lists of the minimum stocks of clothing with which their emigrants would be allowed to embark. Bearing in mind the length of the voyage, the uncertainty of laundry work being possible, and the difficulties of personal cleanliness, the lists make interesting and in some ways instructive reading. These are the articles that the Company considered essential 'for health and a decent appearance':
Female2 gowns, or 18 yds printed cotton6 neckerchiefs2 petticoats, or 6 yds of calico6 towels2 ditto flannel, or 6 yds flannel1 pair stays12 shifts, or 30 yds longcloth6 pairs black worsted stockings6 caps, or 3 yds muslin2 pairs shoes6 handkerchiefs1 bonnet6 aprons, or 6 yds checkNeedles, pins, buttons, thread, tapes, etc.4 lbs marine soap, 2 lbs starch
Together with
One mattress and bolster for each couple, of coloured wool Knife, and fork, plate, spoon, drinking mug, etc.
The suggestion that materials should be brought by the women instead of garments already made up is indicative of the anxiety of the authorities that there should be as few idle moments as possible. In another note the further suggestion is made that the men, while abstaining from 'anything which might appear like begging', should try to obtain from their friends or relatives any 'half worn garments' they might be willing to spare. 'These would save them much expense, and the making them up anew would form an employment for women and girls on board.' It may have been a wise anxiety, dictated possibly by experience. Cleaning, cooking and contriving, washing when possible—'We could wash very well,' one woman reported. 'I washed for four gentlemen on the voyage, and earned about £5'—caring for children, sewing and making over, and all under difficulties to us almost inconceivable, it seems, nevertheless, that for the housewife the voyage must have been something of a busman's holiday.
It was of course not the steerage passengers alone who suffered during rough weather, though their case may very well have been the worst. 'Had a wretched night,' reads an entry in the diary of a woman cabin passenger, 'from water coming into my bed from the deck, was obliged to nail my waterproof to the side of the ship.' The women in all classes were sometimes too much frightened to go to bed—the din of waves and wind and creaking timbers was in any case too great to allow of sleep.
A storm at sea in those days might, however, have horrors other than the obvious ones. The water for drinking and cooking was sometimes, though probably not always, drawn from the Thames, and was horribly polluted. After about a week at sea, one traveller reports, it looked like pale ink, and tea made with it was undrinkable. In a few weeks the fermentation ceased and all was well; but with the pitching and rolling of the ship in every storm the sediment was disturbed and the water became as bad as ever. That in some ships there were many deaths from typhoid is not surprising. We are told, though the cause is not stated, that in one of the early ships for the Nelson settlement, sixty children died. This was, however, exceptional, though there were usually one or two deaths, and they were mainly among the children. Each ship carried a 'Surgeon Superintendent' in whose charge the 'free emigrants' were specially placed. He was provided with a free cabin passage, and the Company contracted to pay him ten shillings per head for each adult emigrant 'landed alive and in good health', with an additional bonus of £50 on receipt of a report 'from proper parties, satisfying the Directors that the duties of the Surgeon have been fully and adequately performed, and that he has paid every requisite attention to the health and comfort of the free Emigrants committed to his charge.' A cynical suspicion inevitably arises of a possible connection between the specific mention of adult emigrants and the fact that death claimed chiefly children and the children of 'emigrants.' But it is almost certainly unjust. The men appointed to the positions of Ships' Surgeons were, from available evidence, well qualified, by humanity as well as by knowledge and skill; and in the conditions under which the voyages had to be made it would seem that deaths were most creditably few. The truth probably is that those who died were by the circumstances of their birth and upbringing predisposed to disease; many of them no doubt bore its seeds in them when they were brought on board, and were ill-fitted to withstand the rigours of a ship-board diet of a hundred years ago. Of some we know that they would not in any case have survived. One can, however, think with sympathy of mothers fighting for their babies' lives, with the dice so heavily loaded as they necessarily were.
If the doctors could not always save the sick children, they could at any rate ease things for the mothers when babies were born at sea, and there were few ships on which three or four births did not occur during the voyage. It is noticeable that the majority of these babies were, rather against probability, reported as 'doing well'—born though they were in all the turmoil and confusion incident to a voyage in a small sailing-ship, with the rudder 'working about' and the sails 'threshing against the mast' in a calm, or splitting in a sudden squall, and with so plentiful a lack of the kind of food suitable for a mother both before and after the baby's birth. To the regular noises of a modern steamer one's mind quickly adjusts itself; they are found even to be soothing, so that the first night ashore after a long voyage is made sleepless by the unaccustomed quiet. Was it the same in these small ships, so quickly and so powerfully affected by any slightest change in the force or the direction of the wind? It must have been at best a wildly syncopated rhythm, jolting and jarring to the mind as well as to the body of a sick woman. Yet they survived.
All passengers were warned to pack their possessions with particular care, and if possible 'in tin boxes.' 'Those who do not like to go to the expense of this,' however, 'will find boxes lined with … pitch paper answer the same purpose.' The kind of trunk recommended was a 'bullock trunk,' which was very strong and said to be impervious to sea air. 'Leather trunks are very expensive, and are themselves liable to mildew.' Many cabin passengers used the brass-bound sea-chests of cedar or mahogany, which still beautify New Zealand homes, appearing to have stood unharmed the long voyage and the passing of the years. But tin was best. 'Let everything you care about be cased in tin,' a woman wrote from Port Nicholson, 'as the air spoils all.' Nor was there only air to be contended against. Another passenger spoke of the 'salt-water drip over all our things in the cabin.' Even in a properly constructed chest, as it might have to be opened during the voyage and was liable to get wet in a heavy sea, boots and shoes were found to become mouldy.
Steerage passengers had to provide themselves with strong canvas bags for the clothes immediately needed. All boxes were stowed in the hold; and while those of cabin passengers were hoisted between decks several times a week, people in the steerage were allowed access to theirs only every three or four weeks. Twenty cubic feet was the space allowed each adult passenger free (the Canterbury Association reduced this by half for assisted emigrants); passengers other than steerage class could have more, paying, as they do now, for excess luggage as freight. The charge for this in the forties was at the rate of fifty shillings per ton, or forty cubic feet.
The fact that no boxes were allowed in the steerage quarters is a pretty clear indication of how restricted they were. To be battened down for the greater part of several days and nights, a hundred or more necessarily imperfectly washed men, women and children, must have been a nasty experience. It should be remembered too that they ate (when it was possible) where they slept—there were no separate rooms. Bad weather in tropical waters simply does not bear thinking about. Even cabinclass passengers, except those who had secured the superior accommodation in the poop, suffered greatly. A woman diarist records a thunderstorm with heavy rain. 'The heat has been dreadful as hatchways and skylights were obliged to be closed, and many were ill from the rolling and the heat.' A week later she says, 'The sunsets and moonlight evenings are now most delightful, but oh! the horrors of 10 o'clock! it is like descending (to compare great things with small) from Paradiso to Purgatorio.' And in a short month, 'Our cabins below are as cold now as they were hot in the tropics.' She is full of pity for her fellow-passengers in even less comfortable circumstances. 'Now,' she writes a fortnight afterwards, 'the weather being milder the steerage people have begun to walk upon deck a little, they spend a great deal of time in bed during the cold weather.'
Cabin passengers were instructed to bring with them candles (gentlemen 12 lb, ladies 6 lb, an amusing distinction) and a cabin lamp or candlestick. The ladies found it possible to boil a kettle over the candle lamp, 'such an excellent discovery.' No such suggestion was made to steerage passengers; for them, living entirely in their 'public' rooms, ship's lanterns provided a dim light for such evening occupations as were open to the emigrant. The readers among them were possibly not very many; but there would be singers, very likely an instrument or two; and in some ships the music in the steerage quarters was excellent. There was singing and orchestral work in the 'cabin' too, and concerts on the poop deck to which the steerage passengers were sometimes invited. On fair nights they had dancing on the deck, and the fair nights were perhaps more numerous than the foul. 'We have had summer all the way,' a young wife wrote.
There were of course other, but mainly day-time, diversions. The Company suggested that all who possibly could should bring a book or two, which could be collected at the beginning of the voyage and used for the common benefit as a circulating library; and that circles should be formed for those who could not read, each to be conducted by one who could. The formation of discussion circles was also advocated in which questions might be debated bearing on various aspects of colonisation. Most strongly of all, classes for children were recommended, to be held, with a regularity broken only by stress of weather, for two hours each morning and one in the afternoon. Teachers for these classes were often to be found among the cabin and intermediate passengers, men and women willing and thankful to be able to get through some of their own time in a way so likely to be useful. The Company's accent on regularity was, however, generally found to be a counsel of perfection. Deck sports—races and round games—were also among the possibilities. The more literary-minded found an outlet in the production of 'newspapers'—there was often more than one issued in a ship; and it was sometimes from the steerage that the first move came. The women in the steerage may have taken little part in the writing, though the reading and discussion may very well have served to lighten a weary hour; and in other parts of the ship women did occasionally contribute.
Christmas at sea must have been very strange to these travellers. 'We thought of you on Christmas day,' a young woman told her parents; 'we thought how comfortable you all would be sitting round the fire, while we were tossed about on the bottomless sea'—a cruel break with tradition. But there were compensations, for she goes on, 'We had a sight on Christmas day that would have been worth £5; we saw a most beautiful iceberg in the open sea.' In most ships no doubt some special dinner-time effort would be made, within the cook's resources, to mark the day. The cabin passengers in one ship were served with 'roast turkey, goose and ducks, boiled fowls, beef, and plum-pudding, champagne.' It is pleasing to know that 'Dr W. gave the emigrants a sheep and glasses of grog.' It was not turkey and plum-pudding; but as they were then well on in the fifth month of the voyage, probably none had ever known a Christmas dinner that tasted better.
For the majority of ships there were no ports of call. 'We never saw land after we left Dover till we saw New Zealand.' They needed all the diversions that could be devised. Some of these were provided by nature—porpoises played about the little ships, whales spouted near and far, and flying-fishes, each in sunny weather with its small rainbow, were as fascinating then as now; while by night there was the lovely miracle of phosphorescent waters. Strange birds too were seen: cape pigeons, cape hens, boobies, stormy petrels, sea swallows, albatross; all of them were interesting, and some provided 'sport' for the men and sometimes fresh meat for the messes. Three weeks from New Zealand one passenger reported 'a sunset of such beauty as to be well nigh worth coming this far to look at.' More often then than now there were other ships to be seen, lovely ghosts on a night of moon, or with sails gleaming in the sunlight; and they supplied an interest and a pleasure that are denied to modern travellers by sea, for very often they passed so closely that shouted conversation was possible, and not infrequently a boat could be lowered and sent across, if the stranger were homeward bound, with letters. 'About 2 p.m.,' reads an entry in a diary, 'spoke and boarded the Blair of Maryport… from Colombo to Liverpool out 87 days.' An officer and two passengers 'went on board, took about 50 letters and a present for the Captain of a basket of potatoes. They stayed on board for half an hour and had some lunch.' It was not possible that the homeward bound ship could tell the other much news, but 'our party told him of the Income Tax and of the death of the Duke of Orleans.' And for 'our party' the little excursion must have been an immense pleasure, while their report on their return would be listened to by the stay-at-homes with pleasure little less. If the ships were bound in the same general direction there was of course great rivalry, and in the extreme monotony of the life aboard feeling ran absurdly high. 'The Plantagenet … is considered one of the smartest ships belonging to Wigram and Green…. Consequently we are not so much annoyed with her at slowly drawing ahead as we otherwise should have been.'
Occasionally a calm, in other respects most trying— 'Nasty calm day with heavy pitching motion of ship over the long swells, most disagreeable'—was made the opportunity for a lively relief from boredom. On one voyage of which a record remains two boats were lowered one afternoon; the mate took 'a good party of the gentlemen' in the jolly boat, while five ladies accompanied the captain in the gig. 'It was rather dreadful,' one of these ladies reported, 'getting up and down a loose ladder which swayed about from the side of the ship,' and with imagination's eye on the costumes of the fifties one can believe it; 'but it was a delightful change getting away from the ship for a little while, and we had great fun running races, hailing each other, singing, etc. We got home with a good appetite for the Dolphins which were fried in batter and proved very good eating, though I doubt whether we should have liked them much on land.' No boatload went rowing from the steerage on this occasion; but fishing was an occupation with which all could amuse themselves who could beg a little bait from the mess cook, and possibly there was dolphin fried, though not 'in batter,' in other quarters than the 'cabin' that evening.
A less pleasant diversion was provided by unlisted passengers. 'Have seen during the past few days many little black ants on the floor of the cabin, they bite sharply,' says a passenger; and on another day he reports a conversation overheard at breakfast: 'What do the cockroaches live on?' 'Cabin passengers, Mr C.' But ants and cockroaches were not the worst of these little troubles. 'Painted the side of the cabin where the panels and sofa were taken down on Saturday'…. 'made further search for bugs and worked all morning at arranging the cabin.' Ants, cockroaches and bugs were not respecters of persons—they may indeed have found happier hunting in the cabin quarters; for it is in the diary of a lady cabin passenger that this plaintive entry is found: 'This evening I determined to enjoy a night's rest, so manfully lighting a second candle I examined well the walls of my prison and caught and slew about 30 be-you-gones ! ! !' This was a sore trial, but one which has been not unknown to voyagers in our own time, at least 'within living memory'.
In some ways the women who made these adventurous journeys were much less well equipped for them than the modern women. The greater suitability for travel of present day dress is obvious. Even those who do not run to slacks or shorts for the voyage at least do not have to battle with dresses that need to be 'reefed and double-reefed' for a walk on deck in windy weather, nor with the wide hats that frequently blew overboard. 'Two hats have blown overboard this week, so Mrs W—has been busy at work. Luckily she brought plenty of plush so the old story of the ill wind holds good in her case.' It was better indeed when in cooler weather 'bonnets were substituted for hats.' But while there is considerable charm in the old pictures of ladies parading the decks in crinolines, bonnets and shawls, it cannot be said that they look particularly ship-shape. They do not appear, however, to have suffered any very conscious inconvenience—they could not miss the freedom they had never known. It did on the other hand take all their courage to face certain 'disagreeables' to which the modern woman does not give a thought. There was an inescapable publicity about the ship-board life to which it took time to accustom oneself in those days; and one young lady complains of the discomfort she felt at 'encountering people in my dressing-gown' on the way to the bath—she was travelling cabin class, and 'we have a capital salt water bath every morning if we like, both plunge and shower.' But the spirit which had carried her, so very unsuitably garbed, down that swaying ladder into the captain's gig, brought her triumphantly through this trial also. 'Now,' she says after about three weeks, 'I have got quite used to it, and enjoy the Bath extremely.' It was good training for the colonial life that was before them. 'Once away from what we are accustomed to,' an early arrival in Canterbury wrote, 'I cannot help thinking how perfectly absurd many of the at home absolute necessaries seem.' The right spirit, and they had it in abundance.
Considering the large number of ships that made the long voyage from England to New Zealand, there were surprisingly few disasters. But there were enough. We hear of fearful gales, and terrifying seas smashing over the decks, carrying away skylights, binnacles and compasses, of masts crashing and water pouring below. Sometimes all on board, men and women alike, were kept at the pumps ceaselessly for days and nights together, in the slender, fading hope of saving their lives. The wonder is that they did so frequently survive against such fearful odds.
All sea perils were of course immensely greater when ships had no means such as we have of communication. Fire at sea, still the most greatly dreaded of all disasters, meant then a very slender chance of escape for those on board. Of the 473 people aboard the Cospatrick, bound for Auckland in 1874, only three survived. Fire broke out at midnight and spread so rapidly, in spite of the efforts of passengers and crew to control it, that it terribly hampered the work of getting out the boats, and the first two lowered sank at once. Two were kept afloat; but after four days of terror enough a gale sprang up, and one of these was never seen again. In the remaining boat forty-one men drifted about for ten days before being picked up. By then all but five had died of hunger, thirst and exposure, many of them having first become insane. Of the five rescued, two died on board the rescuing vessel.
This was perhaps the biggest of all the sea tragedies of New Zealand colonisation. But there are still living in Dunedin a brother and sister who as children in 1861 suffered and escaped this terror of fire at sea; and the story, as vividly told by their grandmother, who also with her husband was one of the nine passengers to go through the terrible experience, is still a lively memory in the minds of other New Zealanders. From the day that she left Plymouth, Nelson bound with general cargo, the William Brown was in trouble. The Bay of Biscay proved no better than its reputation, and day after day the small 400-ton ship was buffeted and tossed by gales and angry seas. Days grew to weeks, and a month after leaving home she had beaten her way against mainly contrary winds to a position about two hundred miles from Madeira. Now at last things began to take on a more cheerful appearance. With a favourable wind all spirits rose, and that night they sat long over their meal, the captain leading the discussion of their more hopeful prospects. A few minutes after he had gone on deck, however, one of the men came to him to report smoke from the hold. Storms, contrary gales, high seas, had after all been favours compared with this. The story was told in a letter to her family in New Zealand, written by the passenger referred to, as soon as she was safely back in England, and printed in the London Times of that date. Her husband, who had gone on deck with the captain and therefore heard the first report, hastened down to their cabin with the news. 'I folded up my knitting, put on my bonnet and shawl and went up.' All hands were now at work with buckets. The women collected the children from their beds, took them on to the poop, dressed them, and wrapped them in blankets. Then they went below again to their cabins, by this time full of smoke, and taking such small valuables as they could carry, purses and papers, returned to the deck, sheltering under blankets from the rain which had now begun to fall. The captain's desk and sextant were brought up from his cabin by the steward, together with a bag of biscuits and a cask of water; but the man was overcome by the smoke when he returned below for the chest. He was brought on deck, but all their efforts to restore life were fruitless. There was oil and turpentine among the cargo, and before long it was obvious that to save the ship was impossible. Sitting 'perfectly quiet,' the women and children watched the two boats being lowered, the women wondering whether there would be room for all aboard, and, quietly still, saying good-bye to their husbands in case of the worst. A heavy sea was running, and there was great danger to the boats tossing beside the burning vessel—danger too that the foremast would be burnt through and fall on them before they could get clear. Eventually all were got into the two boats, made fast together, and the captain cut the rope that still held them to the ship. There was only one chance for them— that the glare of the fire, now burning fiercely, would be seen by a passing ship. They must therefore keep close to their disastrous little vessel; but with the wind increasing and a cross sea rising, it was beyond their powers. In imminent peril of being swamped, they lost three oars, and 'worked as men who work for their lives,' and yet they drifted farther and farther from the one small patch of the wide Atlantic where hope lay. And when about an hour after midnight they saw approaching the green and red lights for which they longed, they were missed, and the ship passed out of their sight again. Their shouts were unheard; they had a rifle, but it was wet and would not fire; they had a lantern, but could not strike a light. Still one chance remained, and they took it, though with heavy hearts. The second mate and the crew of the gig were cut loose from the long-boat, and sent off in what seemed the forlorn hope of getting in touch with the ship, their would-be rescuer. At the first sight of dawn those waiting in the long-boat tied two red handkerchiefs to one of their remaining oars and held them aloft; and as the light grew, once more they saw the ship bearing down upon them. Ship and gig had found each other; they were saved. The steward's was the only life lost; but it would almost certainly have been otherwise had there been ninety passengers instead of only nine.
It is, of course, only the few who seriously anticipate such disasters; if it were not so, New Zealand's history would have been very different. 'I folded up my knitting, put on my bonnet and shawl, and went up.' So figuratively hundreds of other women folded up their knitting, and, putting on bonnets and shawls, quietly faced these and other perils, and all the acute discomforts of the long voyage to the new land where their hopes rested. Dangers and discomforts were accepted without fuss. Indeed the spirit of all these diaries is one of great cheerfulness, even of enjoyment. The young, unmarried women who were given free passages by the Company or by the Government, though they had not the responsibilities nor quite the same difficulties as the married women, had nevertheless their own special troubles, and in some respects were more to be pitied. In at any rate all ships except the quite early ones, and it may have been the same in these (information has not been available), they were in charge of a matron working under the ship's surgeon. The rules that bound them were strict. They were not allowed to speak to any of the men—officers, crew, or other passengers; 'if we do,' wrote one of these girls in her diary, 'the punishment will be confinement for a week and to be fed on bread and water.' The punishment was several times incurred by a few of the wilder spirits; but on the whole the girls in this ship seem to have been very tractable. The extreme roughness of the weather encountered may have had something to do with it; for long days at a time they were battened down in their own quarters, where the water was sometimes ankle deep, and there was not much chance of breaches of discipline. They were divided into messes of eight, and provisions for a week were served out to the captain of each. They prepared their own food, but were not allowed in the galley, and had to hand it to a 'constable' who passed it on to the cook and returned it to them ready for the table. They washed not only their persons but their clothes in cold salt water. 'I want to see how the others get on before I try,' says the cautious writer of this diary; and later, 'The salt water washes better than I expected it would.' They had to get up at five to do it, and the days were often long enough already. They were allowed on the forward deck whenever the weather was fine enough, and some of them were completely happy as long as that was possible. But they had to go early below—in some ships they were locked in at 8 p.m.—where, however, in good weather, they could have 'such rare fun' with dancing (there were concertina players among them), games, and theatricals which sometimes the married women came to watch. And the rest of the ship seems to have been mindful of them; when albatrosses were shot, one was sent down for them to see; and the captain and his wife were kindly and attentive. The matron had plenty of sewing for them to do; they were not obliged to take it, but most of them were glad enough to do so, and the name of the girl was put into each piece of work she did, so that her capability in this matter at least might be seen when she landed at her destination. It was not an easy life by any means; and the matron's was often much harder, as readers of Mrs Duff Hewett's little book, Looking Back, will know. Nevertheless, like the women in other parts of the ship, on the whole they felt their pleasure greater than their pain. 'I enjoyed it,' the writer of this diary, now in her ninety-first year, said in answer to a question, 'I really enjoyed it.' And indeed the entries in her diary give ample evidence of it.
In those days, however, the end of the voyage can surely never have come, as it does for a few rarely good travellers now, too soon. When the first sight of land was expected, some of the men sat up all night, climbing the rigging and stretching their eyes as soon as the first dim light of day appeared; and once land was certainly announced the whole ship was in a ferment. 'We first saw it,' runs a woman's letter, '… in the morning about 3 o'clock, like a very black cloud. I promise you there were not many in bed after the cry of land in sight was given.' It was the first they had seen since they had left Dover, and 'one of the most picturesque and beautiful scenes that I ever beheld.' They were near the entrance to Port Nicholson, the first of the Company's passenger ships to arrive, and the end was in sight. But that was 20 January, and two more days were to pass before they reached their final anchorage off Petone beach—the sort of sickening delay that ship after little ship experienced as long as they graced the seas. Indeed even to-day New Zealand frequently offers no kindlier welcome; it is not uncommon to experience halcyon weather for the first twelve thousand miles, only to be mercilessly buffeted by wild winds and heavy seas almost within sight of port. Even the 16,000-tonner must sometimes still be hove to and wait with what patience she may the pleasure of the elements. But this, the strong nor' wester that kept these early settlers from their desired haven, was the final hindrance. On 22 January they beat their way into that noble harbour; and opposite Pito-one, where the hills opened out into the fertile valley of the Hutt, they dropped anchor. The white sails were furled. The voyage was over.
3The Early Home-Makers
Arrived in New Zealand the women found themselves in circumstances which varied according to the place in which they, or their husbands, brothers, or parents, decided to settle; but in no case were these circumstances easy. The earliest settlement under the New Zealand Company was at Port Nicholson, and the first shipload of settlers arrived in the harbour, as we have seen, on 22 January 1840. Although two of the Company's ships had preceded them, the Tory, with Colonel Wakefield in charge of a preliminary expedition to arrange land purchases, and the Cuba, carrying the survey staff, nothing was prepared for the new arrivals. The surveyors had indeed arrived only between two and three weeks before them. The women, of whom there were about forty, remained therefore on the ship for a time, while the men went ashore every day to work for the Company—the only employer, of course, at this stage, when no land had been allotted and no settlement likely to be permanent could be made—and to make what arrangements they could for the reception of their families. When these were finally landed it was on a small jetty run out from the Petone beach. Their first dwellings, most of them close to the beach, were either tents, or huts put up for them by the Maoris. Conditions at first were necessarily primitive, and more than one of these earliest arrivals speaks of the 'gypsy life' she was leading, and enjoying, with her family. Like the first women in the Bay of Islands a quarter of a century before, they did their cooking out of doors, 'over wood fires, laid upon the ground.' They did their washing in the Hutt river, and in all probability this seemed luxurious enough after the difficulties of ship-board laundering. Soon more ships arrived, and in due time landed their passengers, and within three months the little settlement contained over a thousand men, women and children. Tents ran short, whares could not be quickly enough put up, and some curious makeshifts were seen. One young man and his wife, with their friends, spent several weeks in a shelter made from an upturned jolly boat lent by their ship, with 'an old sail, some canvas, blocks of wood and a spar or two.' It 'rained tremendously' for days after they landed; and even those in tents and whares were little better off for protection against such weather. 'I sat three hours,' one man wrote to his family, 'with an umbrella over Mrs Pierce, after which we rolled our-selves in our blankets and slept soundly.' 'I am very well contented,' said another, the owner of a tent more substantial than most, 'that I have not yet been obliged to sleep with an umbrella over my head, as most others have done.'
There may have been some faint hearts among them; but they seem on the whole to have been able to regard their troubles lightly. 'It was,' the young bride of the upturned boat remarked quietly, 'a long journey to make just to see some rain.' At first through those summer months it was a prolonged and magnified picnic, and apart from the rain most things pleased them, and the prospects seemed delightful. Even the rain, they felt, did them no real harm. 'The climate is so fine that everybody laughs at such things,' he wrote who possessed that superior tent; and even the Pierces, who when they tired of the umbrella, rolled themselves in their blankets 'and slept soundly,' were next morning 'as gay as possible,' and 'felt no cold.' 'People,' the husband added in his early optimism, 'do not take colds as in England.' Many perhaps had come from crowded city areas, and they thought themselves now in paradise. Harbour, hills and bush were beautiful to them beyond conception—that bush, musical with streams and with the song of tuis and of innumerable pigeons, still in those days gay with bright-winged parakeets, and possessing then as now its own exquisite and incomparable scent.
Food was abundant and very cheap. Letters from the earliest arrivals remark on the quantities offish of various kinds, on the pigeons 'twice as large as our English ones,' the pork, the potatoes, Indian corn and native greens—'a piece of pigtail tobacco weighing 1 oz, value 3d, brings a basket of potatoes weighing about 30 lbs, including the basket, made of flax.' 'One native offered us a very large pig, nearly 10 stone, for a large shark-hook, worth a shilling, but we disdained to take advantage of them; they afterwards sold their pig for 2 shirts.' 'On Saturday I gave 3 yards of calico for a pig, 40 lbs weight.' 'Pigs, potatoes, fish, vegetables, and pigeons abound here, and the necessaries of life can be had for a mere trifle; if you lend your gun to a chief he will return in the evening laden with game.' It was good fare after the monotonous months of ship's food.
'Glorious' climate, plentiful food, and beauty all about them, living in those first days a simple life of freedom and extraordinary interest, they improved daily in health and were happy. 'My wife and child are happier than ever they were in their lives,' wrote a proud husband and father, 'Little Catherine is growing stout and healthy,' and 'as tall as a poplar.' 'I have been more healthy since I came here,' a woman told her parents, 'than ever I was in my life before.' They were beginning to find the truth of the promise that had been made them: 'The British fair may rely that England's rose will not fail to blossom in New Zealand in all its natural richness, giving the unmatched tinge of the flower…. The danger is that it may even throw that of the mother country into the shade.' 'The climate,' wrote another colonist, 'is fine and healthy, and I now enjoy better health than I ever did in my life.' 'Do not persuade medical men to come, for, unless they become farmers, they will be unoccupied.' Save, however, in one branch of their work: as a doctor himself wrote, '… medical men, though they will not have much to do in the way of sickness, will still find their hands well employed in bringing young ones into the world.'
Some of the women were terrified at their first sight of the Maoris and at their wild welcome. One of them wrote to her mother-in-law a few days after her arrival by the first ship, 'I shall like the country very well. It is a complete paradise … but I shall always be in dread of the natives; they are very harmless, but I don't think I can make myself happy. We shall have the missionaries amongst us very soon; then we shall be comfortable—I hope we shall.' She, poor woman, had another reason, however, for being cast down, for her little boy had died at sea (the only death among the Aurora's 148 passengers); and although he had been consumptive, and she had been told by the doctor that he could not have lived six months on shore, it was natural that her distress of mind should be renewed in writing of his death, and a shadow partially obscure the radiance of the new day. Others were quickly filled with admiration and affection for the friendly people among whom they found themselves. 'The natives are exceedingly well disposed,' wrote one, '… They are perfect models of the human species, and really are a splendid and superior race. They are intelligent, generous, faithful, open, and brave, and they will not brook an insult; they are honest, very honest, and will, if you treat them properly, do you many little favours.'
Their little native-built houses too, despite their weather-resisting deficiencies, pleased and interested them enormously. A few of the more prosperous had brought out with them the 'Portable Colonial Cottages' which figure largely in the advertisement columns of early numbers of the New Zealand Journal. According to the makers these, 'panelled throughout, painted inside and outside, with doors and fastenings, glazed folding windows, floors, joists and roofing complete,' could be 'removed from one station to another, struck and erected again in a few hours.' It sounds well, and those who had been able to afford them were probably the envy of their fellow passengers. Actual experience, however, brought other feelings. 'It has been a source of great vexation and expense to me,' wrote a disappointed owner. 'The original cost of the house, and the putting it up, will stand me in little less than £200, whereas I expect if I am compelled to take it down the materials will not yield more than £40 at the outside.' As for the assertion about the ease and speed with which the houses could be erected, it is 'perfectly absurd. Several parties … have found that it requires the labour of three or four carpenters for three or four weeks at least to erect them properly—besides the necessity of purchasing extra timber, building chimneys etc., to make them at all comfortable.' The Maoris, on the other hand, one of the women told her friends, 'build beautiful houses. Major Baker and several others have had very nice ones built, consisting of four rooms each, for which they pay four blankets…. Do not think of bringing a house,' though, she adds, 'the window frames, doors, bolts, bars etc., may be of use.' 'We all prefer them [the Maori whares]', yet another reported, 'to the trumpery wooden houses made in England.'
Free or assisted passages had been granted by the New Zealand Company to certain classes of 'actual labourers', between the ages of fifteen and thirty, 'going out to work for wages in the colony', preference being given to married men accompanied by their wives. Single men and single women were also given passages on specified conditions. The men must be 'accompanied by one or more adult sisters', the women 'under the protection of their parents, or near relatives, or under actual engagement as servants to ladies going out as cabin passengers on the same vessel.' The young women encouraged by receiving preference were 'those accustomed to farm and dairy work … sempstresses, strawplatters, and domestic servants.' It was the Company's declared policy to keep the proportions of the sexes as nearly as possible equal; but notwithstanding this, of those, including cabin passengers, who came out during the first three months of the settlement, the men outnumbered the women by almost three to two. It is, of course, impossible to say how many of the women were single—Very few', one of the earliest arrivals states in a letter home. But as she adds, 'we have one or two weddings every Sunday,' it would seem that there must really have been a considerable number. Wives were in demand. One young Scottish woman regretted that she 'happened to marry' before leaving for the colony, 'as she might have got an independent gentleman here.' 'Inquire for Mary Miller,' the same writer says, 'tell her to come out, and not to marry in Scotland…. Let all my friends know that have female families, as it will be a fine place for them.' It was a land of opportunity for men and women alike; but thus early was the 'servant problem' created in New Zealand.
For months the definite settlement and formation of the town were held up, those responsible shillyshallying even as to the best site. Petone had originally been chosen partly because of the larger area of level ground to be found there, with the fertile Hutt valley, to provide the rural sections of the land purchasers, in convenient proximity. When at last Colonel Wakefield consented to the change of site, the town had still to be surveyed; and although this (1100 town sections of one acre each) was completed by the middle of August, it was not until October that the move was begun, and still the 1100 rural sections were to be dealt with. Meanwhile in March each settler had been allotted temporarily twenty acres, and the picnic continued.
New Zealand was still 'like a paradise,' a paradise without the serpent. 'There are no reptiles or venomous things of any kind…. There is no corroding care.' Government, for the Port Nicholson settlers, had not begun. 'No tyranny rules in this blessed land: when it pleases us, we can take our gun or our rod in our hand, and stroll along the shores, and in the woods, and shoot as much fowl, and take as much fish as we like; no taxes are levied here to oppress us. We may say with Tell—"Blow on ye winds, This is the land of liberty".' Not that they knew no hardships. Prices began to go up— 'The natives are getting wide awake now [April]— they want money for everything; when we first came we could get a pigeon for a biscuit, and potatoes the same; but the English people have spoiled them entirely.' 'Of course,' says the same writer, a woman, 'being a new colony, we have to go short of many little things, such as beer, which is 1/6 per pot, butter 2/- per lb.' Tea, states another, also writing in April, was five shillings per pound, coffee two shillings, sugar sixpence, ale and porter two shillings per bottle. Flour seems to have varied from sixpence to eightpence per pound. Pork was cheap, fourpence to sixpence; mutton, 'when there is any,' one shilling, and beef the same, but by June it was up to one and eightpence—and these prices are for meat 'by the carcase.' Clothing, a woman reported, was 'middling,' 'about half as much again as in England,' and only the strongest materials were serviceable. Boots and shoes wore out quickly, and Francis Isaac, 'the first shoemaker,' got a good price for his work, and could not cope with the demand. Housekeeping, though as yet simple, was not easy for slender purses.
For the time being, however, 'we find plenty of work.' The men were for the most part employed by the Company. At first the wage for a labourer was '£1 per week, with 10 lbs of meat … 7 lbs flour, 6 oz tea, 7 oz sugar and a superabundance of potatoes; a place to live in, and plenty of wood to burn.' A few months later a wife tells that 'the men get 30/- per week now, but they will get as much as £3 very soon, for when people get their land there is not near enough workmen.' Nor was there as yet any prejudice against the married woman who chose to work. 'As for myself,' wrote this one, 'I can get as much washing and more than I can do at 4/- per dozen, taking one with another; indeed, I have been so busy since I came on shore that I have not had time to do anything for myself.' She was a woman of great spirit and enterprise. Her health had improved wonderfully, and she was ready, in spite of acknowledged hardship, for any amount of work. 'I am going to open a coffee-house,' she declares, 'and sell ready-made tea and coffee; there is no one in the colony that does it, and I think it will pay very well.' Already she and her husband 'have saved more … than ever we did before,' and 'we have bought a nice house, and about 10 acres of land … about 20 miles up the country, but we do not mean to go to live there just yet awhile. I have so much work it will not do to leave it, but still it will be there when we like.' They had given £5 for it—'it is beautifully situated at the sea-side.' No wonder spirits were high.
There were new pleasures too for the professional men. Each on his twenty acres was hard at it. 'Fustian coats and thick shoes are very fashionable, and you would laugh to see officers, doctors, and dandies— digging, thatching and chopping with great frenzy…. Economy is the order of the day; and I carpenterise, and carry logs, and cook, and go to council without detriment to my gentility.' The writer was apparently a bachelor; the wives of such men, 'officers, doctors, and dandies,' there is little doubt, were equally busy, keeping their small wattle and daub or raupo houses as clean as was possible; cooking, they too, on fires out of doors, or presently learning the tricks of those temperamental camp-ovens on open fires within, learning by hard experience what it was to be colonists' wives.
They seem to have thought the summer would never end—or at least the approach of winter held no fears for them. 'In short, there is no winter,' one of them wrote in mid-March after a full fortnight's experience of this southern paradise. But it was undue optimism. Winter came. The Hutt river was in flood. One woman whose first son was born on 1 June, woke next morning to find two feet of water in the house, and soon her bed was afloat. She could not be moved, so the suggestion was made that her mattress should be 'suspended … to the rafters of the house.' To this, with probably very just suspicions of those rafters, she objected so strongly that they were obliged to leave her and the baby floating. Fortunately the river rose no higher, and with the turn of the tide began to fall. But there had been time for much cruel havoc. The belongings of many settlers had been carried away; everything that was left was thoroughly wet, and fires would not burn. Earthquakes too contributed to the discomfiture of the settlers, and although their insubstantial dwellings stood up well enough to these, they were less proof against flame, and on one night of earthquakes a whole row of raupo whares was destroyed, and at a blow all the passengers of one ship were homeless. Curiously there is no mention in these very early letters (unless we may except the quotation from Tell, where the emphasis seems rather to be on 'liberty') of the winds so soon connected with the name of Wellington. Yet already in 1850 the joke was established which still in a slightly altered form passes current. 'You may know a Wellington man,' Mrs Godley wrote in that year, 'by his having always his hand on his hat.'
Flood, fire and earthquake were, however, enough. Even those to whom the 'gypsy life' had been at first so welcome a change from crowded tenement and cramped ship's quarters, must have begun to feel a doubt, and to long for a more settled way of life, and some solider shelter from the climate that seemed after all to belie its early promise. By the beginning of spring the town survey was completed and the sections chosen, and within a short time 'Britannia' had fairly come into existence. 'Direct to us at the city of Britannia, Port Nicholson, New Zealand,' a woman proudly wrote. Conditions were still of course extremely primitive; and although on 22 January 1841, Wellington's first Anniversary Day (the name had been changed in November) was celebrated with a 'Subscription Ball' at Barrett's Hotel which lasted until five-thirty next morning, and was followed by a boat race and a hurdle race, an arrival in 1841 reported that, expecting to find 'something like a town,' he was disappointed that only one house, Colonel Wakefield's, was to be seen. The population was already doubled, and new colonists continued to arrive. The accommodation problem seems to have been almost as great as at the start, and this difficulty was not overcome for several years. Large raupo sheds were put up to receive the newcomers, but were quite inadequate to meet the demand. The overflow had to make the best of an empty store-house, 'over-run with rats and very dirty,' on the floor of which a space was marked off with chalk for the occupation of each family. Here with their luggage and a fortnight's rations they had to make what they could of a discouraging situation. There must have been heavy hearts at such an introduction to the land of promise. But there was worse to come. The land difficulties were not yet solved, the Government in Auckland was in financial straits, and little employment was to be had by the men—even a skilled tradesman, one of them wrote at the end of 1842, was lucky enough if he averaged two days' work a week. Food prices were up. Earthquakes were frequent; rain further depressed spirits already low; wind whipped at nerves. But earthquakes, rain and wind had to be accepted among the conditions of life in this cruelly distant land. Escape from it for the great majority was out of the question. In one respect at least, however, the letters of these later emigrants repeat the story told by those of the first comers: in spite of wind, rain and earthquakes, of unemployment and high prices—in spite generally of hardships and privations now all but unimaginable, the health of the struggling little community remained good. And this thing being added unto them made all else possible. They faced their difficulties, most disastrously increased for some by the fire which, on a night of nor'west storm, destroyed some fifty of the little houses on the beach, with all the stores and the bits of furniture in them. To save anything except their lives was impossible; to do even that would-be helpers were obliged to take to the sea, standing there up to their waists, so fierce was the heat in the fanning of that Wellington gale. 'It was a magnificent sight,' said one of those who had hastened to offer help, 'but a melancholy event in its effect on our future. Bread, meat, butter, and everything we now considered necessary became very scarce and dear, and often we could get nothing to eat but potatoes and pork, and these chiefly from the Maoris.' Subscriptions were called for to provide what relief was possible for those whose all had been destroyed, and no doubt there were many who gladly gave them temporary shelter in their own fragile and crowded little homes. The loss of one was necessarily and too obviously the loss of all.
These setbacks notwithstanding, progress was made. In what spirit they tackled things is shown by the experience of one family of which a record exists (in Chambers' Journal). Husband, wife, young son and two little daughters, one a baby in arms, they were among those who, arriving in mid-winter, had had to make shift with their bit of floor space in the dirty, rat-infested store-house. They would have returned home to England if they could. That being impossible to them, they set to work to redress their harms. It is typical of the woman, and of many another woman among the pioneers in every part of the country, that looking round that dismal store-house, with its little groups of despondent men and women and bewildered children, one of her first acts was to go out into the bush growing close to the door, and, collecting some twigs, to bind them together for a broom. It was the eternal home-maker asserting herself instinctively and in spite of the horror that the woman felt at all about her, dirt, rats, peeping tattooed faces and wild nature, so far from the familiar way; and it appealed to the home-maker in every other woman there. They followed suit, and quickly the best was made of an exceedingly bad job. Within three months this family had rented a section, sixty feet by twenty-four, at £9 a year, had built a small house, sold the major part of the linen and other household goods they had brought out for their own use, and, with wares bought from incoming ships, stocked a small shop. They had learnt to value the Maoris, not only as their best customers, but for their genuine friendliness, and their tenderness with the children; and they were quickly learning their language. The husband took work besides, when he could get it. Their difficulties were not over, however, and still their main aim was to save enough to get out of the country where conditions were so different from those they had been led to expect. And so they struggled on, the wife adding to her various employments by dressmaking, when she could find time, for the Maori women. Gradually things improved. By the unyielding persistence of people such as these Wellington, and the other towns as in their turn they were formed, throve and prospered. In little more than a year after this man and his wife had landed, a year of much mental and frequent physical distress, they had begun to look upon this new country as their own; and before the end of their second year they were urging their friends to join them, and the wife was able to say, as those earlier wives had said, though prematurely, 'I have never been so happy in my life.' They had within a few years attained wealth and prosperity. Others had done likewise; and before New Zealand's first ten years as a colony were run there were probably many who would have said with them that except for 'a longing after absent friends in old England,' they had not 'a single earthly wish beyond New Zealand.' Others less stout-hearted and self-reliant drifted no doubt to degradation and despair. But there can be no doubt that the majority, men and women alike, were at work of one kind or another, and that hard. On the Wellington municipal roll of 1843, admittedly an incomplete list, there were only two names whose owners professed themselves merely 'gentlemen,' and it is more than likely that they too were actually in the ranks of the manual labourers. They were perhaps the 'dandies' referred to in a letter quoted earlier, who, together with officers and doctors, were 'digging, thatching and chopping with great frenzy.' There was still work of this and a similar kind to be done. If the thatching was finished, gardens remained to be cultivated. These 'gentlemen' may have been among those who produced the 20 lb cabbages and 9 inch potatoes exhibited with just pride at the early Horticultural Shows that became a feature of the Anniversary Day celebrations.
Meanwhile other towns were being founded, and agricultural pursuits had been begun, both on the outskirts of the towns and in isolated places. Wanganui in 1840, Auckland and New Plymouth in 1841, Nelson early in 1842, Otago in 1848, and Canterbury (youngest of the Company's ventures) in 1850, each provided its special problems for the men and the women who made the brave adventure in its earliest days. Wanganui was an offshoot of the Port Nicholson settlement, some of the less patient spirits, weary of the long wait occasioned by the land difficulties, deciding to ignore the prohibition and launch out on their own account. To the hardships endured by the pioneer women everywhere, were added here the anxieties and dangers of conflict with the Maoris. In the circumstances it is not surprising that the development of the little settlement was arrested. There was in 1843 a population of only 210; but by 1847, after serious native troubles and the murder of a woman and several children, this was reduced by a hundred. It may be possible to take the view that these very early Wanganui settlers had brought their troubles on themselves, that to leave the comparative shelter of Port Nicholson was foolhardy—it is easy to be wise after the event. Foolhardiness, however, has nearly always in it a generous measure of courage; and that it was needed, together with an equal power of endurance and of patient hope, by the women who shared fully here as elsewhere in the colonising labours of the men, we cannot fail to acknowledge. Need for blame is long past; reason for admiration remains and will remain always.
The first settlement in Taranaki was sponsored by the Plymouth Company of New Zealand, acting in co-operation with, and soon merged into, the New Zealand Company. The directors were quick to profit by the reports of conditions at Port Nicholson: and before despatching the first large body of their colonists, they sent out a party of labourers, properly equipped, to prepare as well as they could a place for the main body, so that these might take immediate possession of their land, and find 'ample preparations for house-building and crops for the ensuing year.' The intention was excellent. They were, however, perhaps not fully aware of the initial difficulties; and the William Bryan's passengers, who arrived off the Sugar Loaves at the end of March 1841, must have had a hard first winter in their new home. When the Amelia Thompson landed her passengers on the last day of September that year, there were indeed huts and whares ready to receive them; but the town survey was not completed until 4 November, just a fortnight before the next ship arrived. The difficulties were considerable. The site was covered with high fern and scrub which hampered the work of the surveyors; while heavy timber, for bridges and more permanent houses, had to be brought some two miles. As at the end of 1841 the community possessed 'one timber-drag, two hand-carts and six wheelbarrows,' but no horses nor bullocks, so that all traction was by man-power, it can be seen that progress was necessarily slow. Many of the settlers had been unused to manual work so hard as this, but they were not deterred. In spite of alarm caused already thus early by the attitude of the Maoris, and by the disorderliness of the whalers along the coast, letters written in the early months of 1842 are full of brave hope and cheer. 'Jane' tells that she is taking in lodgers and getting fifteen shillings a week, while two of her brothers earn each thirty shillings and the third twelve. One has bought a town section, and they have clubbed together for a country one. 'Mary Ann is still living in her place with the doctor. If her father was to see her he would not know her. I should say that the wages and gifts what she gets by sewing is not less than £40 a year.' A few days later Jane's sister-in-law writes begging the father to come. The children are at school: 'it is sixpence a week for Charles, and ninepence a week for Henry.' They are living amid plenty, fine wheat and barley have been grown, 'the finest that ever you saw, very fine.' And on Christmas day, ten of the family had sat down to dinner—a cold leg of pork, new potatoes and turnips, a cold fig pudding. They have their little wants nevertheless. 'Dear father, please to bring me and Jane out a barrel of pilchards each; please to buy a gardening hook too.' She tells of the iron sand, 'and in the interior about a mile from ours there is stone with lead in it all over the place. I wish it had been in ours to have had a mine.' They are engaging letters. And there are others telling similar stories of improved health and happiness. A brother wishes his sisters to come, they 'might do well in service, for wages are very high, from £12 to £18 per year…. As for myself, I work very hard; I am taking down timber and sawing it for Captain King's house; I make my wages £3 per week in sawing…. Eliza works very hard too. She is at Captain King's two or three days a week, and one day at another gentleman's house, for which she gets 2/6 a day and her meat.' 'Don't remain in Old England to starve,' writes another of these far adventurers, 'when you could do better here.' 'I would not go back to England again if I could have a free passage back again.'
It was little enough of material comfort that they had, but it was greater than they had been used to in Old England; and they were made strong by hope. If there were harder times before them they had at any rate a brief period of plenty before belts had to be tightened. Their chief cause of complaint at present was their isolation. They had no harbour, and the roadstead had already acquired a reputation for danger and treachery. They clamoured for the construction of a harbour; but in the meantime they got on with the work of settlement.
In some ways the early Aucklanders suffered more than any other of the 'first' colonists. Coming a little later, they missed the first fine careless rapture, and plunged at once, and as it happened literally, into a slough of despond. Auckland had (in 1840) been fixed as the seat of government, and had been occupied by the Governor and his household early in 1841. Its first race meeting had been held in the beginning of January 1842, its first regatta, in celebration of the second anniversary of Captain Hobson's arrival as Lieutenant-Governor in the Bay of Islands, on 29 January. But when during the first weeks of October that year the first ship-loads of 'real immigrants' for Auckland arrived, the whole colony was suffering its first 'depression.' No wharf even had been built in this the capital 'city' now for well over two years. The passengers were landed in Mechanics' Bay, where, arriving at low tide, they had to make the best of their way, carrying children, boxes and bundles, through water and soft mud up to their knees. For these 343 men and women with their 192 children some twenty or thirty rough huts had been provided. A wretched prelude to several years of great privation, of unemployment and semistarvation. Auckland, destined to be in years to come New Zealand's most populous city, languished in the general stagnation; and that preliminary floundering in the mud of Mechanics' Bay may well have worn, to the eyes of the men and women of the first two ships, an air of prophetic symbolism.
In a few years they were to be joined by refugees from the Bay of Islands; but Hone Heke's war, though at first it seemed, and indeed was, a new disaster, was in part also responsible for the turn of the tide. It was still possible even in 1846 for a boy from the East Cape mission station, passing through the embryo city on his way to St. John's College at Tamaki, to think 'there was not much about Auckland … to interest even a child from the backwoods. A few houses scattered here and there along the newly formed streets were all that could be seen.' Auckland's first difficulties were nevertheless over; and under the firm administration of the new Governor, inaugurated in November 1845, hope and confidence were renewed, immigration was encouraged, and the town began to fulfil the promise that its founders had seen in it.
Hard times, hunger, and the temptation to despair were not confined to any one settlement in these early forties. The first ship taking the Company's emigrants to Nelson called in January 1842 at Wellington, where one passenger noted the 'remarkable absence of hopeful, confident, steady industry.' They landed in Nelson in the following month, and the story of the birth of a New Zealand town was once more repeated—town sections not available for twelve months, rural sections for five years, rough make-shift quarters, growing uneasiness, unemployment, men and women opposing want and hardship with patient courage. The most fortunate were those who had had experience of farming in England. One of these for instance had managed to save enough from his wages from the Company to buy 'two steers and a cow calf.' With his wife's help he turned his fifty-acre swamp section to profit. All day she worked with him, driving the bullocks, cutting sods for fences, clearing the flax. And when the light failed they came in, and, together again, did the cooking and housework. Soon after the Company ceased to give employment, their heifer calved. She made twelve and a quarter pounds of butter a week, and they sold twelve and kept the quarter for themselves. The following year their land produced fifty bushels of wheat to the acre. They bought the section, arranged to take more land, and bought also two more cows, two more bullocks and a few sheep. Their days of hunger, though not of hard work, were over—they had as much butter as they wanted and were able to help their neighbours. Not all had been so provident; not all, of course, had the experience which would have enabled them to be so; and those who had enough potatoes to eat, though they had literally nothing else, were considered fortunate enough. Those who had, or could get, a little flour, made of it a thin gruel; some dug up the potatoes they had planted before the final blow fell, ate them and planted the peelings; others planted the shoots only. Cooking had become horribly simplified. The women had other ways, however, of exercising their inventiveness. Sow-thistles and an occasional eel might be brought in to enliven the diet of potatoes or gruel; but clothing did not grow by the wayside and must be contrived. One mother set the fashion, quickly followed, by making a complete suit for her boy out of a three-bushel sack; while one of the men, who afterwards rose to prominence in the Provincial Council, showed his ability by the 'taste and ingenuity with which he adorned the poor girls around him with fashionable and really pretty and durable bonnets made from goats' or kids' skins, fringed with the skins of the goats' short tails.'
There were those, of course, here as elsewhere, who were not dependent on the Company for their means of living; and there is no doubt that they did what was in their power to relieve the more immediate wants of these, for whom the skies had grown so dark. Charitable relief, however, was probably one of those evils they had come so far expressly to avoid—it was a poor substitute, in spite of all the tact and genuine friendliness with which it was given, for the secure independence they had been promised.
Of the other main settlements it may be said that the members of the Otago contingent were unfortunate in that they arrived, those in the John Wickliffe towards the end of March, those in the Philip Laing about three weeks later in mid-April, at the beginning of a very severe winter; and that the Canterbury 'Pilgrims' were blessed beyond any of the earlier settlers, of whose experience advantage had been taken for their benefit by the Canterbury Association.
One of the earliest arrivals in Otago declares that for 'nearly two months' after they landed 'they were subjected … to one continued downpour of rain.' In these circumstances the usual initial difficulty of accommodation was aggravated; and the women and children were obliged to endure a further period of confinement in their cribbed quarters on the little ships. With any slight lift in the weather they wearily paced the decks, looking to the drenched and saturated shores where the men were at least occupied, though with hard and for most of them unaccustomed work, building in the mud the small raupo huts that here too were the first form of domestic architecture. Somehow from the thickest of the bush they collected enough wood not soaked beyond hope, the women and children came ashore and housekeeping began, though for some time meals could be cooked only if umbrellas were held over the 'kitchen' fires. A further addition had been made to the ranks of the women of New Zealand.
The Canterbury settlers, as has been said, were more fortunate. Not only did they arrive at the height of summer, when the weather was 'delicious', fine and warm; but there was a jetty, there were two hotels, a good road. Moreover, there were 'immigration barracks' of a more substantial build than those even who came comparatively late to the Wellington settlement, for instance, had found. Godley speaks of them indeed as 'four excellent houses… with a cook-house in the centre'; and although they were described afterwards by one of the 'pilgrims' who came out as a boy as 'four small huts,' his remembrance of them is likely to have been affected by the standard of fifty years later, and we may trust Godley's estimate of them as 'excellent' as New Zealand houses went in 1850. There is besides Mrs Godley's evidence. Describing 'the grand ball' held in the following February, she speaks of it as taking place in one of the barrack buildings, 'composed of four rooms,' each about thirty by fourteen. They were palatial. But not all the pilgrims could find house-room. Three of the four ships arrived within twenty-four hours, and the fourth eleven days later, and accommodation in the 'barracks' had to be rationed. A fortnight was the time limit set for each family, and those who were not lucky enough to be 'in' had to make what arrangements they could. Many of them began at once to build. 'Our house was finished,' one wrote, 'in six days from the time we began it. Now we are exceedingly comfortable.' It was comparative comfort only, for the occasional summer rain quickly converted the hastily erected walls and roof into a series of small shower-baths. But to these people who had been so long used to 'the salt-water drip over all our things in the cabin,' a little fresh water was no hardship. Another family rented a lean-to room 'about 10 × 10, with an earthen floor which had been excavated to give standing room.' Timber, of course, had to be brought from a distance, and excavation was an economy. But £1 per week seems a high rent to have been charged for such a lodging. In the sou' west storm that broke upon them before a more permanent building could be put up, the rain filled the excavated part, and the woman and the children 'had to camp on the iron bedstead until the water was drained off.' It may have been during this storm that an umbrella, so indispensable a piece of the colonist's equipment as it had already proved in divers places, was once again called into commission, this time to protect a young mother who had landed only the day before and now, in torrential rain against which the tent lent to her by a kindly settler proved inadequate, gave birth to a daughter.
Most of the women accepted the position at least with outward cheerfulness. But there were two of whom it is told that they exercised their considerable native ingenuity to circumvent the Company's Agent and his regulation. The unfortunate man came several times to the barracks in an attempt to evict a family whose fortnight was run. But the lady was too much for him. On his last visit he received a message from her saying 'she had let down her back hair and gone to bed, and did not mean to get up again.' Another, for whom, with her family, he was unable to provide accommodation, threatened to dig a hole in the side of the hill and camp out; 'and,' she added, 'I'll write a letter to the Canterbury Papers,' (published in London for the information of intending colonists), 'and say we were obliged to sleep on the side of the hill.' The Agent found a room. Neither perhaps can command whole-hearted admiration; they showed at least determination and resourcefulness—qualities in themselves wholly admirable, essential indeed in the New Zealand women of that day.
Comparatively easy as the Canterbury settlers found things, they nevertheless had their peculiar difficulties. The town site had been surveyed; but access to it was not easy. The 'good road' (to Sumner) was far from completed, and all heavy baggage must be taken round by sea and up the river as far as possible. Men, women and children had to climb the bridle track, a steep pinch, the only way over the hill; and they were lucky who could hire or borrow a horse to pack their more immediate needs. One woman indeed, elderly and something plump, found a further use for such a horse: she held to his tail, and he proved quiet and obliging. Few of the younger ones probably would have had a hand to spare. There were bundles to be carried, in many instances there was a child in arms, always there were long and voluminous skirts and petticoats to be managed. When they paused at the top for breath, their future home lay before them—a yellow waste of tussock land, with scattered groups of cabbage-trees and three clumps of bush, not very attractive, we may suppose, to eyes used to the green orderliness of England. When they reached the foot of the hills and were ferried across the Heathcote, they may well have found the prospect even less attractive. Seven miles of rough swampy ground lay between them and Christchurch; and Christchurch itself, when at last, tired and bedraggled in those terrible skirts, they reached it, was not a sight to cheer drooping spirits. 'There was nothing to be seen' one of them told her daughter in later years, 'but the Land Office, a large tent … a large expanse of plain, dotted here and there with Ti palms, quantities of tutu and fern, gullies, creeks and swamps all around, and nothing but a narrow track to guide us.'
In most other parts of New Zealand the Maori whare or raupo hut was the first shelter, apart from the tent, provided for the settler. In Canterbury there were few Maoris, and V-huts became for the time being generally fashionable. 'A V-hut,' a 'first' woman settler wrote, 'is exactly as if you took the roof off a house, and stood it on the ground. You can only stand upright in the middle.' But it served, and many a Canterbury woman had her first experience of really responsible housekeeping in one of these edifices. Sod huts with raupo thatch were also the thing; and a few of these early dwellings remained, having weathered the years in varying states of dilapidation, until comparatively recently.
But the members of the official 'Canterbury Settlement' were not actually the first white inhabitants of the province. As early as 1837 a shore whaling station had been set up at Peraki, one of the many bays of Banks Peninsula, by George Hempleman. In the little settlement there were altogether thirty white men and one white woman, Mrs Hempleman. They prospered, but in the teeth of great dangers and difficulties. The men no doubt were used to a rough life; but Mrs Hempleman was an English girl, from Sydney, and the isolation, as well as the roughness, of the life, with the additional anxiety caused by the war not yet over between the northern and the southern Maori, must have borne hardly upon her. For some time after landing (in March) they slept in casks, their work on their houses being much delayed by the claims upon their time of whales and trying-works. In the end the Hemplemans' own house was one of sawn timber brought from Queen Charlotte Sound, where they had called en route from Sydney. This was the earliest white settlement in Canterbury, though many of the bays on the Peninsula were visited by whalers who called for water, pigeons and a spell. Before long, however, more settlers came—the French and a few Germans, all told about sixty men, women and children, to Akaroa in 1840, and within a few years there were little homesteads in several of the bays—in Red House Bay, in Pigeon Bay, in Flea Bay, at Purau. And when the Canterbury Pilgrims arrived it was no small encouragement to them to find a well-established home at Riccarton, and to see how much had been done in seven short years to convert a wilderness to smiling plenty. The earliest attempt to settle here had been made in 1840, when a Sydney firm had sent their agent and two other men, one of whom had wife and child with him, and two teams of bullocks, to this particular part of the great plain. The ship that followed them with farm labourers, implements and stores was, however, lost at sea with all she carried, and the attempt was then abandoned. The agent and one man returned to Sydney; but the other, with his wife and child, remained. But not for long. The attitude of the Maoris became too threatening, and the little family made their way on foot to Lake Forsyth, a distance of about thirty miles. There were, of course, no roads. The man drove his four bullocks loose before him, and carried a table on his head. His wife carried the year-old girl, and her food ration for the day was one potato. They camped that night at the lake, and went on next day by whale-boat to Akaroa, to seek the protection of the French settlers. The cattle were driven overland. It was their lonely state that had made Riccarton unsafe for them. When the next settlers came in 1843, there were four men, two women and six children, and they appear to have found nothing to fear from the natives. They lived at first in tents; but they had brought timber with them from Wellington, and soon had a house up, using wooden pegs in place of the nails which they had accidentally left behind. It had three rooms—one for each of the married men, with his wife and three children, one for the two unmarried brothers which served also as a common sitting room. Like many other families in New Zealand, the brothers called their new home by the name of the old one they had left, 12,000 miles away and more.
It was a strange, hard life for those women, almost as isolated as that of the missionary women in the north. Almost more difficult was the life of the Peninsula women. The two families who settled in Pigeon Bay in 1843 lived together, fifteen all told, for the first three months in a large divided tent. They had brought with them from Wellington, where they had at last tired of waiting for the land they had bought before coming to New Zealand, two cows and a calf, some goats and a few fowls— also presumably a first stock of provisions, for there was nowhere to procure them on their arrival. The French at Akaroa, indeed, with the sprinkling of Germans, were by now fairly established, an 'industrious, law-abiding, kind and hospitable' little community, each on his little plot of about five acres growing excellent fruit and vegetables. But Akaroa was sixteen miles distant, over steep hills covered with virgin bush. When the schooner in which they had made the trip from Wellington was sold for ten head of cattle, it took eight men three weeks to widen the track in order to get them through to the Bay. Obviously this was not the place to go for immediately needed provisions, even supposing it could have supplied them. Actually the Akaroa settlers, with those in the bays, were dependent for supplies such as flour, sugar and tea, on the visiting whalers.
The tent at Pigeon Bay was exchanged as soon as possible for houses 'of thatch work' with clay flooring, which did duty for three years, when the first timber house was built, all the work being done, of course, by the pioneer families themselves with help from the Maoris. The Maoris had at first welcomed the white people with much friendliness. When the news of the Wairau trouble filtered through, however, they became restless, and much tact was needed to maintain these friendly relations.
The men cleared the bush, cut tracks, built their houses and stock-yards, cared for the few precious cattle, built another boat. And the women? They made their candles, their soap, bread, and butter and, as soon as some sort of appliances could be contrived, cheese. In one family the girls made their own shoes—they must, or go without. The families grew in number and stature, and clothes had to be provided. In this they could not be over particular; neatness and cleanliness alone could be the aim. Butter and cheese were both made for sale as soon as this became possible through the increase of the herd.
The arrival of whalers in the bays was an occasion for much excitement. They carried no money, but they brought stores—flour, sugar, tea, tobacco, some of them brought furniture, clocks, and readymade clothes; and these they exchanged for cheese, butter, fresh fruit and vegetables. There were occasionally as many as a dozen ships in the Akaroa harbour at a time to refit, and even the smaller bays had their seven or eight. But there might be long periods when there would be none, and provisions at times ran short. After a few years the settlers began to grow a little wheat for themselves, but it was long before any mills were established on the Peninsula, and grinding by hand in 'a small contrivance resembling a coffee mill' was a slow business. If flour were wanting, however, it had to be done, and it provided a job for wet weather and the evenings, when it was not possible to be out of doors. When tea was running low they eked it out by mixing with it dried bidi-bidi; and if no whaler appeared in time with new stocks, they used bidi-bidi alone or the young shoots of manuka. Like the earliest settlers everywhere in New Zealand, for meat they had pork and wild pigeons, with occasional duck, and of course fish. But the few cattle were increasing, and before many years it was possible to obtain, a welcome change, fresh beef. The first steer killed fetched two and sixpence a pound, and every pound was sold, and would have been sold if the price had been higher.
It was a day of intense joy and thanksgiving to the settlers living in such isolation when they saw the first of the Canterbury Association's ships sail past the head of the harbour. The women must have rejoiced at least as much as the men. Here was the promise that the far land they had chosen as their home and had learned to love was to be enriched by the labour of more men and women of their own race, here was the hope of new companionship; and here, though they perhaps did not count it, was the possibility of release from much of the drudgery of day to day. Actually that drudgery was for several years increased by the event; the new colonists wandered about the country, looking for land or for work, there were no accommodation houses, and it fell to the lot of earlier settlers to find them food and lodging. This they did most ungrudgingly, sharing maybe their last few ounces of tea, or the last loaf possible until the next ship should be in harbour, with eight, ten or up to twenty complete strangers. They would arrive, perhaps late at night, wet through; and beds must be provided as well as food, and their clothes dried. An already overworked woman might have been excused for murmuring at fate; these women seem to have felt all the extra labour repaid by the delight of this new kind of experience—faces from the outside world, news of communities larger than their own, a sense perhaps of their own place in the nation beginning now to be a lusty youngster.
There were in addition little isolated settlements in various parts of the country from north to south. In 1843 and 1844, for example, Edward Shortland, travelling in the government service, visited many places on the east coast of the south island; and in his journal noted his astonishment, on arriving at Waikouaiti, to hear the sound of a piano, and to find there a white man, with his wife and family, carrying on 'farming operations on a more extensive scale than, perhaps, any other individual in New Zealand.' At Jacob's River too on Foveaux Strait, he found a little group of white-washed cottages, near them 'green enclosures of corn and potatoes,' which had to his eyes 'the most smiling and refreshing aspect imaginable,' a community of forty-eight persons—twenty white men, one white and thirteen native women, two white and twelve half-caste children. Some of the early whalers too had brought their wives with them; but they were in the main only birds of passage, staying with very few exceptions not longer than two or three years.
Pioneering did not end with the establishment of the Company's towns. Nor was it confined to the town districts. Until nearly the end of the century new country was constantly being opened up, little parties of men and women were pushing their way through every kind of obstacle further and further into the back country. Life in the infant towns was hard and primitive enough, cut off as they were from one another and from the outside world. The women in the towns, though their lives were of necessity lives of greater physical hardship than any woman in New Zealand, even in such backblocks as remain, is now obliged to lead or does lead, had nevertheless benefits incidental to membership of a larger community which the country women lacked. Their numbers grew comparatively rapidly; social diversions became possible, were indeed possible from the beginning; shops quickly made their appearance, though no doubt for a time with very limited stocks; medical services were obtainable; newspapers were circulated; libraries were formed; mails, though irregular and slow, were received and despatched with comparative frequency.
But can we at all adequately picture the life of the women, small settlers' wives, whose lot was cast in some country district away from any of the main settlements? It really does not seem possible. Its broad outlines were perhaps the same as those of the average married woman's life in New Zealand to-day—home-making and tending, the bearing and rearing of children, with all that these things involve—but the details were so different that imagination is baffled at every turn.
From the various ports they made their way—by bullock dray or unsprung waggon, occasionally on horse-back, sometimes on foot, camping as they could when night overtook them, to the homes that had been prepared for them by the men who had gone on ahead. The last part of an always trying journey would be through bush, perhaps, over a narrow foot track from which the thickest of the undergrowth alone had been cleared, across creeks where a log must serve as bridge, through swamps in which every step brought terror to the tired woman, often burdened with a baby and her share of stores as well, or across rough, roadless tussock, an unrelieved wilderness.
The homes to which they came were, where timber was available, rough slab huts, roofs of raupo thatch, windows 'glazed' with calico, floors of beaten clay, chimneys of clay, perhaps on a supplejack frame, open fire-places where frequently damp logs needed constant attention, heavy iron kettles and pots, camp ovens; for furniture—boxes at first as tables and chairs, and bedsteads made of saplings to take the feather beds brought across the world, or the mattresses they made from dried fern and raupo, pillows in time from the feathers of the pigeons and kakas that, with wild pork, were their main meat diet. Where timber was scarce, as on the Canterbury plains, the hut was of cob or of sods, delightful when new, but apt as time went on and even when protected by slabs, to spread with every wind that blew a half-inch coating of dust over food, furniture and floors. Even so sparsely furnished they would be crowded enough for a man and his wife, and many of them brought children. And how, in the primitive conditions, were they to be kept clean? The earthen floors were swept with brooms home-fashioned from the bush or scrub near by. When the men could afford time to lay wooden floorings, these were scoured with ashes. So, when such luxuries were added, were the tables.
Water for all purposes had, of course, to be carried, sometimes from a considerable distance. One woman with a young baby, for instance, had a mile and a half to walk for water. She dared not leave the baby alone, so she carried him on her back, the tins for water in her hands, climbing a steep terrace from the river as she returned with her full load. Water so hardly gained was naturally carefully husbanded. She set aside as much as was needed for cooking and drinking; the remainder had to perform many offices—the dairy utensils had it in its purest state, the baby came next; and after his bath it was used to wash the clothes, then the dishes, then the floors, before finally it was given to the pigs.
In the bush country fuel was plentiful, though sometimes its dampness must have added a heavy load to the day's work. But there were women living not only in the bush. One of these, for example, in Canterbury, had nothing for a whole year but wheat-straw with which to do all her cooking; and blubber was the sole resource of another, at a shore whaling station on the Peninsula. The diet certainly was simple, at first mainly meat—pigeons and kakas, wild pork and in some later settlements beef from wild cattle—and bread. It sounds well enough; but it grew monotonous; and it had drawbacks other than its monotony. Wild pork, for example, was excellent, and more digestible than the dairy-fed pork of England; but in the circumstances it was hardly possible to scald the pig, the hair had to be singed off; and the meat is said to have been strongly flavoured with burnt hair. Bread-making also presented its difficulties. The yeast made, the sponge set, risen and ready for baking—and none of these processes as easy, in those cramped and draughty little huts, as they are for the few backblocks women to-day who must still make their own bread—there was still the camp-oven to be reckoned with. If the floor were of clay, it was the practice to heat a patch of it, either by laying hot iron on it, or by building a fire and then raking it off. The dough was then placed on the heated patch, an iron pot over it, and the hot embers over the pot. But if the floor were a wooden one, the camp-oven had to go on the fire. To prepare and keep it at the right heat, with glowing embers under it and on the lid, was a matter that required experience, often heart-breaking enough. Its ways once mastered, the camp-oven was a most admirable medium; but many are the stories handed down from New Zealand's first housewives of frantic dinner hours, with pigeons charred to cinders, or pork raw as it was brought from the bush.
Washing-day must have presented to the bushblock woman difficulties which would seem to us in these easier days all but insuperable. If it were possible, she would do the work close to her water supply, her little spring or stream, with an open fire for the boiling. In bush country, however, fires in the open held special dangers. As it was, where bush was being burnt off, settlers had to be prepared for sudden flight, sleeping sometimes for weeks at a time in their clothes, the bits of furniture buried, the more easily movable possessions packed in readiness for hurried flitting. The washing fire would need constant and careful watching. The soap the early housewife used was of her own manufacture, lye having been made from the wood ashes to take the place of soda. Some might have irons which could be heated in the wood fire; some used flat stones as a substitute, though how they handled them is not explained; many families would no doubt be content, perforce, with linen rough-dried.
Some of the younger women and girls worked with the men, cutting scrub and clearing the land, even in some instances helping with the bush-falling; nearly all had the digging to do for potato and other vegetable crops; nearly all had at least to help with the milking. As much of the milk as could possibly be spared would be set, the cream skimmed and made into butter; and with the butter the women trudged, sometimes for five or six or more miles—they counted themselves lucky if they occasionally had a bullock to ride—to the nearest store, there exchanging their butter for goods, at the rate of threepence-halfpenny to fourpence a pound.
Clothes in all the circumstances wore out with disastrous rapidity; and at the end of a day's hard labour the women sat down to sew. In many districts the only light was a slush lamp—'a piece of rag wound round a stick and set upright in a pannikin of fat, mostly from the frying pan.' Sometimes in parts where wild pigs and cattle were to be had, or when the flock of sheep was large enough to warrant it, they used the fat to make candles. In more favoured districts tallow candles from Sydney could be bought; but most women had to make their own, and some may have preferred to do so. From all accounts the home-made candles can have been little if any worse than those from Sydney, which had to be carefully watched 'or they guttered and ran the vile-smelling stuff over the table.' Frequent snuffing was an absolute necessity; 'otherwise the candles gave off an evil-smelling smoke and very little light.' Sewing and mending, however, had to be done, and knitting, sometimes with wool which they had themselves washed, carded and spun. There are parts of New Zealand still in which mosquitoes are a source of unutterable misery. In these early days, when only a small part of the bush had been cleared, it was sometimes almost impossible to burn a light. Only by keeping the rooms full of smoke from smouldering dry cow-dung could any relief be had. This 'if dense enough, kept the mosquitoes off, and it was not so painful to the eyes as wood smoke.' But it can hardly have been an atmosphere conducive to industry.
There were of course no matches as we know them. If fire, lamp or candle were to be lighted, the tinder-box was brought into requisition. The tinder was burnt linen rag, 'kept in a little tin box, and with it a small piece of steel and flint.' A spark was struck with steel and flint on to the tinder. When the tinder was alight, a 'match,' a small slip of wood the point of which had been dipped in melted sulphur, was applied to it, and when it was burnt to the end of the sulphur 'you had a light if the tinder was good.' Good tinder or bad, it sounds but a poor cumbersome method, and, especially in an emergency such as sudden sickness, or for the mother with a small child needing attention in the night, one that does not recommend itself to our modern imagination.
Many of these women had been used, in the homes they had left, to work nearly as hard; and to conditions not very much less primitive than those in which they had to live at first in New Zealand. But there were others to whom this kind of life was completely new, who had been used to large comfortable houses with an adequate staff for their management, and an existence of leisure and refinement. They came now to homes few of them much better, many of them no better, than those we have been considering. And they worked of necessity as hard as those who had come from humbler homes and been accustomed to a life of toil. Many of them came from cities, and were plunged without pause into all the multifarious employments of farm life in rough, unsettled country, where the land had still to be won from the bush, and conditions were inevitably primitive. They tackled the new life, however, with a kind of proud glee. 'The worst part of the life for me,' one of these women wrote to her friends, 'is that it makes me so fearfully conceited. I am so proud at finding how easy it is to be independent. My mother talks about not being able to bear my being a slave, but I feel myself less a slave now that I see I can do everything for myself than I ever did before.' This young woman was one of a household of twelve—nine men, and the wife of one of these, whose first baby was born a fortnight after her arrival; besides her mother and herself. The house was one of the more successful ones that had been brought from England. 'The house is very comfortable, indeed quite first rate, but then it was only adapted for the accommodation of five people, with a fair proportion of property, and it now contains an immoderate amount of property. Indeed we are now 15 in family, having received three additions in the last three days, namely the Doctor and a nurse and a dear little baby…. the Doctor is to sleep in the shed where five of the young men are accommodated.' It was a situation that might have appalled a far older housekeeper. But this one, the sum total of whose previous experience had been a few weeks' farm tuition before she left England in cheese-making, brewing and candle-making, grew only the bolder and livelier with every fresh challenge. 'I consider myself a much more respectable character than I was, when I was a fine lady in England and did nothing for anybody and made a great many people do things for me.' The young men were working hard, bush-falling and road-making—any housekeeping woman will be able to imagine the appetites with which they returned to the crowded little house. 'When my pantry shelves are scrubbed, the floor mopped, and it contains as it will tomorrow afternoon, a round of boiled beef, a roast leg of pork, a rhubarb pie, 15 large loaves and 8lbs of fresh butter … I feel as self-satisfied and proud as mortal can. A little while since I should have thought it necessary to have somebody to prepare all these things for me, now I can do it all myself.' There were numbers of women who thus 'found' themselves, and they, and the manner in which they disputed the unaccustomed odds, are worth the consideration of any who may still doubt the wisdom of educating their daughters. That increased self-respect is a clue repeatedly found in the letters and journals of these early women of New Zealand. There is too the 'stability and freedom you feel,' as this woman further wrote, whose case is presented because it is typical and clear. 'Everything you see is your very own, the absolute possession of land gives a sort of certainty that with common industry and care you are in what may be your home till death.' This was a feeling shared by women in every part of the country, as well by those struggling in poverty and privation on their little clearings, as by those, wives and sisters, whose lives were less pinched though their labours almost as severe. It was a compensation and an inspiration for all. But the women the circumstances of whose birth and upbringing might at first sight make them appear the more to be pitied, 'plunged thus overhead in unusual employments,' had a further source of strength. The wider implications of their position would inevitably come home more immediately to their bosoms than to the bosoms of those who had not had the same advantages in the old life. 'We feel ourselves,' this woman again writes, 'we feel ourselves members of an infant state, which will every day become more important, and the smallness of our affairs themselves does not make them contemptible when they are felt to be the germs from which great results will grow.' 'The thinking over all this and a hundred other things of this nature, is enough to make the most sluggish person "feel spirited".'
It is hoped that there will be no misunderstanding— their hard manual labours, the difficulties of the position to which they so triumphantly rose, are not here slighted. There is little danger of our forgetting these, even though it is not quite easy in our more favoured circumstances fully to appreciate them in their details. The other side of the picture, the offset to the exhausting daily round provided by their vision of the future (and it was in part at least their then radical ideas of social justice that had brought this family, like many another, to New Zealand), and their sense of participation in events, small in themselves yet moving to a great and noble end— this is very generally overlooked. And they were not exhausted. Their energy was boundless. 'Sometimes,' wrote the same young woman, a Taranaki settler, 'I am in such a state, that I feel convinced that nothing short of going up Mt Egmont can properly relieve me and let off the steam. At present, I only explode in the baking of 10 loaves or the making up of a dozen lb of butter, and an occasional scramble down a gully tearing my clothes nearly to pieces.' Twelve years later a Canterbury woman wrote: 'I am in a chronic state of hunger; it is the fault of the fine air and the out-door life: and then how one sleeps at night! I don't believe you really know in England what it is to be sleepy as we feel sleepy here; and it is delightful to wake up in the morning with the sort of joyous light-heartedness which only young children have.' 'As for fatigue, one's muscles might get tired, and need rest, but the usual depression and weariness attending overexertion could not exist in such an atmosphere.' And it was, as we have seen, not on the physical plane alone that the atmosphere was light and buoyant. We may pity their want of comfort, and more particularly their lack of the mechanical aids that now lighten our own lives, most of all perhaps their isolation; it is quite easy to envy them the clear shining of New Zealand's morning. The sun still shines; but the greater complexity of present-day life casts more shadows on the path that seems less straight and less plain; it is more difficult now than it was then to keep one's face turned steadily to the east.
4Social Pleasures
It Would Be reasonable enough to expect that with a population so small and so scattered, whose members were of necessity nearly all working so desperately hard, social life in New Zealand's infant state would be of the simplest type, and that 'society', in the specialised sense, would hardly for some considerable time, if it would ever, find a place. It was, however, a main plank in the platform of the founders of the colony that it should be 'an entire British community, and not merely one formed of British materials,' 'an extension of England with regard to the more refined attributes of civilisation.' A woman who came out as a cabin passenger in one of the first ships wrote to her friends, 'Pray join us, for we feel quite convinced it will very shortly be a second England.' And it was natural enough that those who had come so far, to a country where life was inevitably in many respects so different from anything they had experienced before, should wish to reproduce at least some of the known ways of their old home. There is evidence that all classes brought with them many of the prejudices and conventions of the more complex society in which they had grown up; and although the force of these was probably weakened by the circumstances of the new life, and they have perhaps never since hardened to the condition of fixed principles, nevertheless in this respect the idea of the founders was only too well realised. Thirteen thousand miles of sea could not kill notions innate through many generations; indeed they may very well have given them in many minds a fresh hold upon life. Mrs Godley, wife of the 'founder of Canterbury', who spent the greater part of 1850 in Wellington, remarks in a letter to her mother, 'It is wonderful how the look of anything at all like home and its ways carries it here (and with nearly everyone) above novelty and even actual beauty. In one of our first walks … we almost shed tears of sentimental admiration at coming suddenly in sight of bits of flat, well-macadamized road!' 'Home and its ways'—an unacknowledged, perhaps unconscious, home-sickness very naturally conditioned much of the social life of the early colonists. For, whatever various reasons may have induced those who came to emigrate, whether it was their liberal ideas or a simple desire to escape hunger and an ever sinking standard of life, all had left behind them friends and relations the separation from whom they must necessarily feel. 'That is the sting of emigration,' wrote a woman who was nevertheless 'becoming clearer every day that it is right for me to be here.' And so, although 'the change in every way is so great,' some of the formalities of the old social life were reborn amid the new scenes of this distant land, serving no doubt to give to those who took part a certain sense of confidence and continuity. By 1850, 'We find everything,' Mrs Godley wrote, 'so much more civilised and like home than we had expected, as to society and those matters.'
Although all were working together, performing their various parts in the establishment of the new little world, distinctions were kept. Many of the early settlers remark on the 'independence in bearing and manner' of the servants and the labouring classes generally, and many of them resented it. To a few it was a delight. 'The look and bearing of the immigrants,' wrote a woman, 'appear to alter soon after they reach the colony. Some people object to the independence of their manner, but I do not; on the contrary I like to see the upright gait, the well-fed, healthy look, the decent clothes (even if no one touches his hat to you), instead of the half-starved, depressed appearance, and too often cringing servility of the mass of our English population.' Unfortunately she was one of the minority. Even she had taken only the first step. It is unlikely that many shared the feelings of the woman who found life in New Zealand intolerable owing to the absence of poverty which she might relieve, in the accustomed English way, with soup and flannel petticoats; nevertheless it is as true as any generalisation can be that, although the foundations may be different, the social hierarchies and conventions came out with, and established themselves among, the earliest settlers and have remained in New Zealand to this day. Let anyone who doubts this, especially any woman, try stepping over the social barriers: she will find that her transgression is regarded, as much in New Zealand as it would be in England, as almost if not quite a moral one. There are, here as elsewhere, 'nice' people, 'people like ourselves'—and others; while the Mecca of too many New Zealand women, and perhaps not women alone, is still Buckingham Palace, a royal Garden Party or, more holy occasion still, presentation at Court. It is a curious and melancholy spectacle. The geographical isolation which might have enabled us to cut free from mere tradition has in fact made us hold to it only the more fiercely; and the trouble began in the first years of settlement, when the homesickness, which we surely ought, in this our hundredth year, to have conquered, was natural enough.
It is not possible to consider the social life of New Zealand before 1840, though that there was a certain amount, even so early, in the only settlement of considerable size (in the Bay of Islands) is evident from Mrs Laura Jackson's account of her father, Gilbert Mair's, household in her Annals of a New Zealand Family. It must obviously have been extremely limited. 'Outside the Mission circle,' wrote Mrs Jackson's eldest sister, who was born at Paihia in 1827, 'there were scarcely more than half-a-dozen families who were fitted to take part in social matters.' But she added, 'We were fortunate in having, as British Resident, a man like Mr James Busby. He was travelled and scholarly, and the perfect type of a courteous English gentleman.' Busby and his wife, 'a very dignified and rather exclusive little Scotch lady, but kindly withal,' were of course the leaders of what society there was, whose chief diversion was probably the always very hospitable entertainment of the officers of visiting ships and of distinguished travellers—Allan Cunningham, the botanist, the Chevalier Dillon, Charles Darwin, and Lady Franklin are among those mentioned as visitors to the Mair household.
Government House, following in 1840 on the Residency, was from its earliest days the scene of much hospitality, and 'seldom a week passed without a dinner party' there. The Bay must sorely have missed Hobson and his family when the capital was moved from Russell to Auckland.
Government House showed the way—the rest of society fell joyfully into step, and the pace appears quickly to have become lively. Only ten years after the settlement of Wellington, not yet, nor for fourteen years to come, the capital, a visiting official complained to his wife in Auckland that he was so often asked to dine out that he would 'be glad to get away to escape from it.' The general want of servants, which Mrs Godley called 'one of the great miseries of human life in New Zealand,' was not allowed to interfere with the pleasures of the social round. The women of New Zealand quickly learned to combine the duties of a cook-general with those of hostess; and even 'the greatest people here' discovered capabilities which astonished women of their own social standing in England, finding it quite possible, even without the smallest earlier training, to do everything 'from receiving company down to cooking the dinner they are to eat; and all pleasantly and well, and so as to be very much liked.'
Dinner parties were among the more formal entertainments. They were sometimes very grand affairs, when host and hostess happened to be among the 'great' who had brought out with them heirlooms in the form of silver and gold plate, which must have looked odd and surprising enough in their primitive surroundings. These were of course rather exceptional cases; most people were glad if they were able to supply enough dishes of a more modest kind. It had not been easy in the earliest days to form an idea of what it would be necessary to bring to the colony. Even the Godleys, in their official position, with all his opportunities of learning what would be necessary, found themselves very short; and Mrs Godley deplored by implication the unexpected necessity to 'consider appearance,' which would oblige them to buy for instance a dinner service, 'instead of a few willow pattern plates and dishes'—and at a price rather more than double the English price.
Dinner, and sometimes lunch, parties by no means exhausted the social energies of the first women of New Zealand. In all the records of the early years there is constant mention of 'balls.' Wellington's first anniversary for example was celebrated on 22 January 1841 with a ball at Barrett's Hotel. One woman who 'walked over to Wellington,' apparently from Petone, to attend it, reports that they 'had a splendid attendance, and were much amused. The ball broke up at five-thirty on Saturday morning.' Not any amount of hard work during the day made the women too tired to dance the whole night through; and there were so few of them that there was no rest—more often than not their dances had to be shared among two or even three of the men. This first of Wellington's anniversary balls was probably less formal than similar functions became in later years, both here, for some time the largest 'city,' and in Auckland, the seat of government. Mrs Godley describes with evident amusement a ball given by the Lieutenant-Governor (of New Munster) and his lady, as part of the celebration of the Queen's birthday in 1850. 'We were asked for "Dancing at nine" on a magnificent printed card, and presented ourselves soon after 9.30, when we found everyone arrived and in superb ball-dresses, apparently just unpacked from London…. We were, I think, all surprised at the general effect of the ball, it was so very good. The dancing was in three rooms, communicating with folding doors, the verandah outside … enclosed as a relief to the room for walking about and flirtation when possible; but, as the Brigade-Major's wife, Mrs sarah O'Connell, told me the other day, "there are only six young ladies here and two of them are old", and the married ladies all dance, and as far as I could judge don't flirt.' For this splendid function music was provided by two bands, that of the regiment quartered in Wellington and that of H.M.S.Meander, then in port, which relieved each other.
But this was a standard which could not be reached in the smaller and newer towns, and was probably rarely attained even in Wellington and Auckland. In Christchurch, for instance, at the earliest balls music was the great difficulty—a piano and a cornet perhaps could be managed, and if someone with a violin could also be found the occasion was looked upon as particularly fine. Distance and difficulty of access, like exhausting day-time occupations, made little difference to the women, whose 'wild spirits' enabled them to surmount all obstacles. 'When the distance was not too great,' wrote a Canterbury-woman, and two or three miles was regarded as 'not too great,' 'we would walk, our dresses tucked up, well shawled, and well goloshed.' We may profitably remind ourselves perhaps of the state of such roads as then existed: the main north road from Papanui, for example, was so bad that it was often only with the utmost difficulty that traffic could negotiate it, and there is on record an instance of a bullock-dray's sinking so deeply into the mud that it was found impossible to extricate either it or the poor beasts, and all was lost. Even in the 'city' the goloshes were evidently entirely necessary. One was lost one night, after a ball, 'in a big mud-hole near the old Post Office,' and before it was retrieved a newly arrived and still unread batch of English papers had been sacrificed to provide light by one of the escort. It is pleasant to record that such prompt and generous devotion received its due reward. If the distance were too great for walking, 'a bullock-dray would be called into requisition,' and with seats made of bags filled with straw and covered with red blankets, and plenty of rugs, proved, as one woman, happily reminiscent, protested, 'very comfortable.' Perhaps the more fortunate women were those who had horses; and many rode in from the outlying districts, their dresses strapped to the saddles, to dance for six, seven or eight hours, at a time when dancing was a matter requiring a considerably greater expenditure of energy than it does in our own day. If there were rivers to be crossed, the dancers would have to come in and return by daylight; and tidal rivers demanded a careful calculation of the latest moment at which a crossing might be attempted.
The country districts too, where the homes were not too greatly isolated from one another, had their 'balls.' The little settlement of Karamea, sixty miles to the north of Westport, but in the early days cut off from it by the magnificent bush-covered hills that He between, may well be typical. Here the music for the earliest balls was provided by one of the women, who valiantly hummed the tunes for the dancers. Later she made use of a comb, which as every child knows is a great improvement on the unaided human voice; and later still, of a Jew's harp. Tradition does not say just when, but she was in time relieved by a young man with a concertina; and before long there was a 'band' of several accordions. When a piano was introduced Karamea had grown to a happy maturity.
Among the 'great' in the incipient cities there had from the earliest times been pianos, which seem to have stood remarkably well the unfavourable conditions of the long voyage. Frequent were the 'musical evenings', which as often as not, however, became impromptu dances before more than an hour or two had passed. It would seem that the men and women of these days could not for long rest inactive. These informal occasions were apparently what the majority most greatly enjoyed. Mrs Godley amusingly describes a Government House party at which 'all the elite of Wellington' were present. 'It was stiff, hot, work, sitting as I did in a very hot room, inventing conversation.' She entered with much more zest into the arrangements for the 'ball' which she and her husband gave in Lyttelton a few weeks after the arrival of 'the first four ships,' 'as a kind of friendly meeting, before the people all separate to go to their selections of land on the plain.' Taking place on 4 February, it must have been work just as 'hot' as the Government House party in November; but it was evidently not as 'stiff.'
The practice of afternoon 'calling' was soon established among the women of New Zealand's earliest 'society.' Tea was already in a fair way to becoming the national drink, and large quantities were consumed, 'a truly colonial and praiseworthy habit,' as one woman described it. An arrival in Christchurch in the sixties says that 'visiting appears to be the business of some people's lives' (and accounts of life in the other 'centres' indicate a similar activity in them); and in her experience the conversation on these occasions was 'almost exclusively practical, even in a morning visit there is no small talk.' 'As for scandal,' she said in a later letter, 'in the ordinary acceptation of the word, it is unknown; gossip there is in plenty, but it generally refers to each other's pecuniary arrangements or trifling peculiarities, and is all harmless enough. I really believe that the life most people lead here is as simple and innocent as can well be imagined.' She deplored, on the other hand, what seemed to her to be the fact that 'the people seem gradually to lose the sense of larger and wider interests; they have little time to keep pace with the general questions of the day, and anything like … intellectual appreciation is very rare.' It was comprehensible if deplorable that the women's conversation showed mainly an absorption, which it has hardly yet outgrown, in the twin subjects of cooking and household management generally, and of the shortage and inefficiency of domestic help.
Picnics were another exceedingly popular feature of social life; and they seem very generally to have been on a rather more elaborate scale than picnics in our own time. For the simpler kind, tea was the recognised stimulant; but the billy of our childhood, to be replaced in its turn by the thermos flask, had not yet come into use, so that a picnic party had to encumber itself with a kettle—no small matter. And, of course, it was of moment that at the place chosen for the meal there should be water. Picnics were generally riding parties; but a waggon sometimes conveyed a certain number of the women and children at least, and was useful too for the hampers or washing-baskets in which the food was often packed. Descriptions of some of these early pleasure parties make curious reading. Table-cloths, plates, knives and forks, seem to have been by some considered merely a matter of course; champagne was set to cool in the streams, potatoes were boiled, poultry, pigeon-pies, a leg of lamb perhaps, were served, and on one occasion at least a roast sucking-pig played an important part before the day was out.
Dinner parties, balls, calling and picnics took place at any time and, with the exception of picnics which were of course a summer-time diversion, all through the year. But 'the slightest provocation,' a woman wrote who was visiting New Zealand a little later, 'is sufficient excuse in this country for getting up all kinds of entertainments.' The Queen's birthday was of course more than a slight provocation; and the practice of making it a whole holiday, with every kind of celebration suitable or possible in the circumstances, seems early to have arisen. In Auckland and in Wellington it was apparently the custom to give a 'feast' to the Maoris; and there was also, as soon as there were troops, a review, with much playing of bands, a royal salute, 'a flourish of trumpets and a discharge of small arms, or as the soldiers here … call it a "few de joy".' The Governor in Auckland, the Lieutenant-Governor in Wellington, held a levée, 'band playing and guard of honour,' and in the evening, as we have seen, a specially splendid ball. The infant Christchurch celebrated its first Queen's birthday by holding a regatta in Lyttelton (and this was naturally a favourite form of amusement in Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin as well); but the day was so breathlessly still that no sailing races, even with the children's model ships, could be held. For rowing races, however, the weather was perfect; and these were followed by Maori dancing and after lunch by 'a soapy pig, and a greased pole, and a wheel-barrow race.' A tea-party for the children, with a magic-lantern show as soon as it was dark enough, the children greeting 'each new slide with loud shouts of delight,' concluded the celebrations for the majority. But 'there was a very gay party' on one of the ships then in port, 'first dinner and then dancing. There were eight ladies on board, and about forty gentlemen, and as seems always the case, the fewer the lady-partners were, the more anxious were all the gentlemen to dance; in short it was very successful, and everyone thoroughly tired next day.'
Horse-racing, as one might expect, was among the first of public amusements in New Zealand. The women did not, of course, take part in the actual official races; but one of them describes the fun and excitement there was in the early days of the Riccarton meetings, when the course was simply 'a vast grassy plain,' and she among the other spectators would ride to see the start of a race and then dash across 'full gallop to the winning post to see the finish.' Country race meetings long retained at least something of this jolly, picnicking atmosphere; but it is doubtful whether any are now quite so pleasantly care-free as this sounds. You cannot have everything: our comforts are incalculably increased with our years, but the freshness and elasticity are gone with the informality.
Some of the towns very quickly boasted their theatres: there was for instance a repertory company formed in Wellington in 1843, which for some time at any rate gave two performances every week. Musical societies too were established, both choral and instrumental. In all these activities, as in the more serious business of the colony's foundation, women took their part beside their husbands, brothers and fathers. And other of the more intellectual interests were not neglected. Public libraries and reading-rooms were established well within a year of the first settlements. How much use the women could, or did, make of these there is no means of knowing; but many were genuinely well educated, so that it is not unreasonable to imagine that they would welcome such social amenities as gladly as the men. We do know that numbers of them were as ready, with petticoats looped up and with Wellington boots over their own lighter footwear, to plunge through the muddy streets to listen to a lecture, as they were to face similar difficulties for the sake of a ball.
The various churches were from the outset centres of social life in New Zealand. Their charity work, apart that is from the work of the mission churches among the Maoris, was for long directed mainly towards causes outside this country. Even as late as 1890, we find a group of women in Christchurch meeting once a week at the house of a friend to work for the Kilburn Orphanage in England. This may, however, have been an object in addition to others nearer home; for the woman who tells of this Christchurch group speaks of the community as being interested in 'many philanthropic movements.' It was no doubt a labour of love; but it was admittedly also a pastime for the winter months, when entertainments were few. 'There are no picture-galleries,' she writes, 'few concerts, and good companies at the theatre are very rare.' The cinema had not yet arrived to fill all gaps. These women formed themselves into small committees, 'each one in turn providing entertainment; readings, recitations, music, acting, and the like, helping to relieve the monotony of the work.'
A kind of charity-work-cum-entertainment which very early raised its head in New Zealand, and is still rather scotched than killed, was the bazaar. We hear of a fund-raising function of this kind, by which a sum of £600 was realised, as early as 1857 in Auckland; and it was evidently not the first of its kind. Nor is it likely that Auckland held a monopoly. Many churches and other organisations had for a long time their annual bazaars. In the early days these were largely the affair of Society in particular; but the net was flung gradually wider. Most girls' schools were drawn in, and during some months of each year every spare moment of the children's time was occupied in the making of articles, some of them beautiful, and some useful, but many which were saleable surely only on the score of charity. After the months of preparation came the one, two or three days, occasionally in later years as much as a week, of the actual sale, when the women stood for long hours in their 'stalls,' in a hall noisy, generally hot and stuffy in spite of its draughts, and before long unattractively dirty. There can be very few New Zealand women between the ages of about forty-five and eighty who have not at some time been through this gruelling experience. The heyday of the bazaar was the middle period of New Zealand's history, and coincident with the time when the problem of domestic help was at its least acute. But although by its means large amounts of money were raised, the system became burdensome to a degree altogether incommensurate with its financial worth, and may be said in the main to have broken under its own weight. Other ways have been found to fulfil the same end; and, except apparently in some country districts, the way of direct giving is now very generally seen to be the wiser one.
Thus far all that has been said of early social life in New Zealand has concerned mainly the towns. 'Balls,' as we have seen, were possible in some at least of the country districts where a number of families had settled fairly near to one another. In such little settlements, as soon as homes of a kind had been made, one of the first cares of the settlers was to provide a school for their children, and the schoolroom was always a centre of community life, serving besides its primary purpose another as a place where church services, dances and concerts might be held. In some of the smaller districts too more democratic forms of amusement were established. A large fire would be built on fine nights, the settlers brought contributions of food, and all joined in a community meal round the fire, spending the evening afterwards in singing and dancing, talking, discussing their common concerns, and playing round games. In Akaroa it was the custom for many years for every family to give a dinner annually to all the rest.
In some parts, however, farm homesteads were separated by many miles, by hills, by heavy bush, swamps or dangerous rivers. For the women living in such circumstances, social life consisted largely in the hospitality which they offered to chance travellers. It was a hospitality which almost literally knew no bounds. In the complete absence, or prolonged scarcity, of accommodation houses, the little houses 'up country' seemed sometimes to have walls of some substance more elastic than cob or than slabs of timber. As many as seven or eight young men might turn up at one time, more rarely there might be a woman in one party of travellers; and they came nearly always unexpectedly—necessarily, when no regular means of communication existed. The difficulties and trouble of accommodating such numbers, though they might be great, were cheerfully accepted by the women, being more than compensated by the pleasure of fresh companionship after it might be months of comparative isolation. If there were maids, they were as much pleased as their mistresses with the sight of new faces. Space was as a rule the main problem, but one which seems never to have been found insoluble; except in rarely unfortunate instances, the food supply presented no difficulty. It was only if stores happened to be drawing to an end, and the weather made the procuring of fresh supplies impossible, that hardship of this sort was occasioned by, and for, the travellers; and Lady Barker's classic experience in 'the great snow-storm' of 1867 was happily most unusual.
Sometimes, of course, these travellers, who might be weatherbound at a station for three or four days or longer, were friends, or at least acquaintances, of the host and hostess. Often, however, they might be complete strangers. This appears to have made no difference to the hospitality offered; letters of introduction were not required; one's necessity was enough to open doors and ensure a welcome. In the earliest days of the Canterbury settlement the Deans home at Riccarton was especially noted for its generous hospitality. Ten or twelve people to lunch, some of whose names even might be unknown, was no unusual thing, and on occasion these numbers were doubled and even trebled. 'You just walked in,' said a Canterbury woman, 'and were treated with warm hospitality.' As years went on, and hotels and accommodation houses were built, the need for this tax on the earlier settlers, and on the men and women of the back country farms and stations, though so willingly and freely paid, was reduced. But the habit of mind long persisted. In 1891 a visiting Englishwoman spoke of hospitality as 'almost a ruling passion in New Zealand.' Long after the more urgent necessity had ceased to exist, women in the country were still liable to be called upon without notice to provide bed and breakfast, at the least, for the wayfarer. The habit of 'turning up' unannounced, even in places where every facility exists by which due warning may be given, the New Zealander has never entirely outgrown; and he, or she, is apt by it sorely to disconcert his English cousins when fortune takes him overseas.
While chance 'parlour' visitors came in diminishing numbers, others, who at least in early days had been received almost as warmly, increased to the proportions of a small army; and by the last decade of the century swaggers, at any rate in Canterbury, had become a serious problem. 'The custom of the country,' wrote the wife of a station holder of the sixties, 'demanded that you should ask no questions, but simply tell any travellers who claimed your hospitality where they were to sleep, and send them in large supplies of mutton, flour and tea.' By the nineties it had become necessary on all the larger stations to employ a man to cook and care for them. 'The owner of a small property told me,' says a woman who was visiting Canterbury, 'that one night when only he and his sister were at their lonely homestead eighty of these uninvited guests made their appearance.' Even supposing this, as we perhaps may, to have been an exceptionally large invasion, it is obvious that 'the custom of the country' was one which placed a heavy load on the shoulders of even the prosperous farmer. One hears less of this kind of visitor in the North Island. There, however, the women had long to reckon with being called upon by parties of wandering Maoris; and until they became accustomed to this, and learnt that the intentions of their visitors were almost never harmful, they very naturally found it alarming. Some of them had been through the years of trouble between the two races; all of them had at least heard stories of those times; and they were often alone, save for the younger children, during the greater part of the day, and sometimes, if the men were employed on bush-falling or road-making work at a distance, they were without their protection except at the week-ends.
Picnics and occasional house-parties were possible for some of the up-country women, though there were long spells of loneliness between. But for many the only taste of social life they could get was in meeting travellers. Until their numbers grew so unwieldy, one can imagine that the swaggers would be really very welcome on outlying stations. They might bring news of the outside world, they would at least have had experiences different from those of their hosts, and some of them would make interesting and amusing companions at any rate for a brief evening. Of the genuineness of the welcome accorded to travellers who came with more immediately recognisable and more personal credentials, there is no question. In the years when roads were few and poor it very seldom happened that a woman was among these. In the middle of the sixties a party of five or six men set out from Nelson in an attempt to find a bridle path to the West Coast. After a terribly strenuous journey of several weeks, they arrived at a sheep station on the Grey river, where they were reclothed and fed by the owner and his wife, 'who had not seen any other woman for seven years.' We have no means of knowing how many more were to pass before she might meet one. Such isolation was comparatively rare; but there must have been many women who lived in places where there could be no certainty of their meeting another for long periods. Lady Barker describes the pathetic eagerness of the welcome she received from the wife of a sawyer at the head of Lake Wanaka. During her visit this woman, so starved for companionship, would hardly let her guest out of her sight. 'All she required of me,' says Lady Barker, 'in exchange for her incessant toil on my behalf was "news". It did not matter of what kind, every scrap of intelligence was welcome to her, and she refused to tell me to what date her "latest advices" extended. During the three days of our stay … I gave my hostess a complete abridgment of the history of England—political, social and moral, beginning from my earliest recollections. Then we ran over contemporary foreign affairs, dwelt minutely on every scrap of colonial news, and finally wound up with a full, true, and particular account of myself, and all my relations and friends. When I paused for breath she would cease her washing and cooking on my behalf, and say entreatingly, "Go on now, do!" until I felt quite desperate.'
The accounts of Lady Barker and of others of the difficulties of travelling in New Zealand, make it clear that a holiday jaunt was for many years not a matter to be undertaken lightly by any woman. Perhaps the simplest way of travel, when it was possible, was by sea; but the discomfort, let alone the danger, of such journeys was unimaginable. Mrs Stack, who before her marriage made several expeditions from Auckland, to the Waikato, to the Bay of Plenty and inland from there through the lake district, and to Poverty Bay, kept a journal which is full of interest and instruction. In 1858 she went to Tauranga, a journey which in favourable weather occupied about twenty-four hours, but on this occasion in a twelve-ton cutter took ten days. The cabin which she shared with two other women and two little girls was about six feet square, and 'hardly high enough to stand up in.' There were three bunks along the walls, and in the middle a two-foot wide table with a bench on each side, while a narrow shelf above the bunks held the provisions which the passengers themselves had to provide. The man of the party had to sleep, with 'two dogs and some poultry,' in the hold, 'where he was provided with an old sail for bedding, which he had to spread on the cargo of potatoes, which served him for both mattress and pillow.' The cabin was separated from the hold only by battens two inches apart. Twice the little vessel had to run for shelter, and they spent a most miserable forty-eight hours at anchor, pitching and tossing, though on the lee side of Mayor Island, in a south-east gale. 'No one can imagine,' Miss Jones (Mrs Stack) recorded, 'what the combination of sickening smells was like on board that little craft, or what misery we endured from the foulness of the air … when shut down for the night in the little cabin. The vitiated air of such a confined space, in which so many persons were breathing, would have been bad enough, but when added to that was the smell caused by the flaring wick of the fish-oil lamp swinging over our heads, and the warm sickly odours wafted in from the cargo, mingled with whiffs from the dog kennels and poultry-pens in the hold, and, worst of all, the foul gases rising from the "bilge" … which was being incessantly churned up by the motion of the waves, it is a wonder that we were not suffocated or poisoned by it.'
This was sea-travel in the fifties and sixties. Yet undeterred by such an experience, this young woman was off again in the following year to Poverty Bay. The cabin this time, she said, was 'very superior in size and fittings' to the one she had occupied in the little cutter. But it appears to have been hardly less lacking in privacy, since it was shared by the three other passengers and by the captain, the berths being separated only by curtains, and was also the common sitting and dining room. 'We never thought of undressing at night, and took any favourable time during the day for making any necessary changes in our dress, etc.'
Very shortly, of course, steamers were running between the main ports; but although they were rather less at the mercy of the weather, the general opinion seems to have been that the days of sail had been pleasanter and more comfortable. The steamers at first were small, noisy, and 'miserably weak' against a head wind. Nor were passengers certain, on New Zealand's rough coast, of being able to make the desired port. On one of Miss Jones's journeys, from Wellington to Auckland, via Nelson and New Plymouth, she had as a fellow-passenger a woman who had been carried past her home at Taranaki, owing to bad weather and the impossibility of landing her, and all round the island; and on this occasion too had to be taken on, 'doomed to another weary voyage.' And her experience was said to be 'not uncommon.'
The miseries and discomforts of land-travel were different: they were not less. The actual travelling was bad enough, and full of dangers, whether it was undertaken on horseback, by dray or, in favoured districts, by stage coach. In many parts the roads were barely formed, little more than tracks— through heavy bush, across swamps and unbridged rivers. Travellers were sometimes held up for days and even for weeks by flooded rivers, camping as they might, and sometimes short of food, until the waters subsided. When accommodation houses began to be built on the main routes they were of the most primitive kind, frequently consisting quite simply of two rooms, one for men and another, opening out of it and with no other door, for women. Beds were provided, but no other furniture of any kind. Many of them were infested with fleas and overrun with rats and mice. On some of the less travelled roads huts were put up in which camp could be made for the night. In these the fleas were if possible even more numerous and lively and of better appetite than in the occupied accommodation houses and inns. Sandflies and mosquitoes provided further torments. Miss Jones describes a night spent near Matamata, on her journey from Tauranga to the Waikato. Her tent was put up inside an empty roadside hut. 'To protect myself,' she says, 'from the venomous bites of the mosquitoes, I had borrowed on leaving Tauranga, a starched sun-bonnet…. Over this I fastened a thick veil tightly down. I covered my hands with gauntlet gloves, and fastened my sleeves carefully over them at the wrists. But nothing availed to keep the venomous insects from biting me. I was soon in such a fever that I lay tossing about all night, beating the sides of the tent with my hands in the vain effort to drive away my tormentors.'
Necessity sometimes dictated such journeys, but they were occasionally undertaken for pleasure. The energy, endurance and adventurousness of most women was satisfied by the conditions of their daily lives. As the little towns grew, however, and comforts increased, there were always a few whose circumstances enabled them, and whose tastes inclined them, to travel. The earliest travellers were no doubt carried through the difficulties by a pride in doing something that no white woman had ever done before, and in penetrating to places in which no other white woman had ever set foot—a sort of extension of their pioneering activities. It was long before travel became in any way easy; the women of the first and even of the second generation born in New Zealand might well hesitate before undertaking a journey of any great distance. Only within the last thirty or forty years has it been possible to travel with anything like reasonable comfort in New Zealand; and even now there are possibilities sufficient to satisfy the normal woman's appetite for adventure. The New Zealand woman of to-day can, however, make a journey in as many hours as the same distance took her grandmother days, and in some instances weeks, to cover; and she can make her plans beforehand with a reasonable certainty of being able, with all the regular and frequent services by road, rail, sea and air, to carry them out.
Her isolation is dispelled. In the towns she has only an embarrassment of possible diversions and distractions; and even the backblocks woman can keep in touch—if she does not see her friends as often as she would like, yet she can speak to them, as a rule, by telephone; and the news, not only of the colony but of the whole world, may be hers for the turning of a switch.
5Occupations
The First Number of the New Zealand Journal gives a summary of the trades and occupations of emigrants granted free passages by the New Zealand Company in the first nine ships sent out by them. Among these are six dressmakers, one dairywoman, one laundress, three milliners, four nursemaids, nineteen sempstresses, one straw-plaitter who was probably, though not certainly, a woman, and forty-three servants. Of the 'servants' we may suppose that a fair proportion would be women. If we disregard all the other women passengers—some at least of whom probably had trades they might follow on arrival, though they were not called upon to give any undertaking—and estimate the servants very moderately at only twenty, this makes a total of fifty-five—nearly nineteen per cent of all the women, and just over twenty-two per cent of the women steerage passengers carried by these nine ships. This means that a large proportion of the first New Zealand women came out prepared to earn their own living. It is possible that some of the domestic workers at least were already married, and almost certain that many of them, others as well as domestic workers, married before very long. There was, however, no ban on married women workers; and the demand both for wives and for women workers was so great that no doubt many of them would contrive to carry on with their work after marriage. By 1847 there were in Wellington at least ninety-two, of a total number of one thousand nine hundred and seventy-one, women who were engaged in work outside their own homes. One of these kept a lodging-house, eight were school-mistresses, ten were engaged in laundry and needle-work, nine were 'milliners and straw bonnet makers,' and sixty-four were in domestic service.
The figures cannot be said to prove anything very much except that by far the greater number of women who were wage-earners were employed in domestic work of some kind. The population increased very rapidly, and the demand for domestic servants was never satisfied. Every incoming ship was besieged both by young men looking for wives and by people in need of domestic help. It would seem that many young women must have signified to the authorities their willingness to act as domestic servants who either had never had any experience of this kind of work, or had very little idea of what would be expected of them in the colony. The great majority of New Zealand households could not afford more than one 'help,' and a young woman who had competently enough filled the position of a housemaid or a parlourmaid in England, might find that of a 'general' very different, especially when the extremely difficult circumstances of early housekeeping are considered. Their 'utter ignorance and inefficiency' was a fruitful subject of lamentation, too frequently heard to be dismissed as groundless. One woman who came out in the sixties, when the flood of emigration was at its height, recounts some of her experiences. 'A girl will come to you as a housemaid,' she says, '… and you will find that she literally does not know how to hold a broom, and has never handled a duster.' Most people complained of the 'independence' engendered in them by the excess of the demand over the supply; but this woman was evidently a 'good mistress,' and her true sense of humour enabled her to see and sympathise with their point of view. For one thing she had to confess her own 'perfect ignorance' when abandoned to her own resources. It is evident that she made no pretences, and she found the girls she engaged as maids quick to respond. Though she lived on one of the up-country stations, and found herself 'changing servants' every two or three months, partly because of the loneliness of the life, and partly because of 'the rapidity with which a nice tidy young woman is snapped up as a wife,' she was generous in her appreciation of the really admirable qualities of these 'rough, queer servants' so much slated by the majority of employers. They were, she says, 'as a general rule, perfectly honest, and of irreproachable morals, besides working, in their own curious fashion, desperately hard. Our family was an exceptionally small one, and the "place" was considered "light, you bet", but even then it seemed to me as if both my domestics worked very hard. In the first place, there was the washing; two days' severe work, under difficulties which they thought nothing of. All the clothes had to be taken to a boiler fixed in the side of a hill, for the convenience of the creek, and washed and rinsed under a blazing sun (for of course it never was attempted on a wet day) and amid clouds of sandflies. Not until evening was this really hard day's work over, and the various garments fluttering in the breeze up a valley behind the house…. We had a mangle, which greatly simplified matters on the second day, but it used not to be uncommon on back-country stations to get up the fine things with a flat stone, heated in the wood ashes, for an iron. After the washing operations had been brought to a more or less successful ending, there came the yeast making and the baking, followed by the brewing of sugar beer, preserves had to be made, bacon cured, all sorts of things to be done, besides the daily duties of scrubbing and cleaning, and cooking at all hours for stray visitors and "swaggers".' It was all done, she says, willingly, and with the greatest cheerfulness.
This was acknowledged to a be a 'light place.' A small family (there were no children), a sympathetic mistress who herself took a share in the work, and two maids—the only serious fault was perhaps the isolation. But other 'places' were less ideal. Some of the girls started work at a very early age—twelve, thirteen or fourteen. There is a record of a Nelson girl who at thirteen became maid-of-all-work in a family of nine. The house was large, and this child had everything to do—she made butter and cheese, did the cooking, the baking, and all the housework, and, apparently at her own desire, helped to milk the nine cows. She had help only with some of the cooking. Small wonder that it was often midnight before she was in bed, and that many tears were shed. 'I used to cry and work but I got used to it.' More, 'I liked it. They all got very fond of me and I did of them.' Her wages were two shillings a week, doubled at the end of three months; and before she left, after fourteen months, they had risen to six shillings—'so,' she says, with apparently quite unconscious pathos, 'I got myself some nice things.' This was during the bad times in the forties. It may have been an unusual case; but we cannot with any confidence flatter ourselves that it was an isolated one. In the late seventies we hear of a girl of fourteen who entered domestic service near Christchurch at a weekly wage of four shillings; and she too worked single-handed. Even as late as the eighties we have the evidence of a woman visiting New Zealand that 'in the Colonies one servant does the work of three,' and with a lack of conveniences that in itself 'doubled' work.
At first there were no 'afternoons off.' In the fourteen months of the Nelson girl's domestic service she went home (a few miles away) only four times; and the Christchurch child had one evening a week free from seven to nine, a privilege which she forfeited if the family wished to go out, or if unexpected visitors arrived. Conditions were very slow to improve. By the end of the century wages had risen. They varied in different districts; but nowhere was a 'general' paid more than fifteen shillings a week, and the average was twelve shillings. A cook might earn as much as thirty shillings, and could everywhere demand not less than twelve; while a housemaid's wage was about the same as a 'general's.'
Given sympathetic and kindly employers, the domestic servant's position might be exceedingly happy. There were many mistresses who took care to consider the comfort and well-being of their maids. They would see that they had, as far as was possible in the conditions by which all, maids and mistresses alike, were bound, some time to themselves during the long day, and would take them, if they lived in the country, for little outings. But this was a matter of individual character; no rule was possible. All other occupations came by degrees to be regulated by legislation: for domestic service in private households it has not yet been found possible, chiefly owing to the difficulty of making any satisfactory arrangement as to hours of work. Efforts have from time to time been made, and have recently been renewed, to bring domestic servants within the protection of a union, and the matter is still under consideration. It seems likely now, however, that this is one of the much needed social reforms which will be made to stand over in the present 'state of emergency.'
It is obvious that conditions of domestic service have, nevertheless, improved since the earliest days in New Zealand. From the very beginning, as we have seen, employers, as well as employees, have found cause for complaint; and attempts were early made by the schools, primary, secondary and technical, to remedy the ignorance, inefficiency and lack of training lamented over the first New Zealand tea-tables. Even the University has taken a hand, and raised domestic science to the status of a degree subject; while quite recently a movement has been started to establish training hostels which, if successful, might be of more general use, and one at least of these is actually in being. What is perhaps more necessary than any of these things is a more enlightened public opinion on the subject of domestic work. Why for instance in a recent Parliamentary debate, should vacuum cleaners and washing-machines have been referred to, on both sides of the House, as luxuries, while milking-machines, tractors and the like were classed as necessities?
Meanwhile it is just that we should recognise that the part played by the 'rough, queer servants' of the early days and by their nameless successors throughout New Zealand's first century is at least as worthy as that of any other women of consideration and praise.
The considerable rise in the scale of wages of domestic workers by the last decade of the nineteenth century represents in part the progress of the colony and the generally rising prosperity. It also reflects the steadily increasing diversion of girls and women from domestic Service to industry and trade and the professions. As early as 1891 the Secretary of the Labour Department noted the 'tendency of the young women … to obtain work either in shops or factories.' 'They prefer,' he added, 'the slightly higher wages and regular hours of commerce and manufacture to the obligations of domestic service'; while the need for industrial workers made their choice 'useful to the bulk of the community.' The census returns of that year show that nearly three thousand girls and women were employed in the factories representing the main New Zealand industries. This was more than double the number returned for 1881; and by 1901 it was itself almost trebled. In no instance do these numbers include the tailoresses, dressmakers and shirtmakers, nor the large numbers of women who were employed as teachers, or in the various departments of the nursing service, nor any of those who had found work in the shops. By 1901 there were over four thousand women and girls employed in the tailoring, dressmaking and millinery, and shirtmaking establishments; there were one thousand six hundred and more nurses; and nearly four thousand five hundred women teachers (including teachers of music and painting). There were about nine hundred more in the shops.
The industries absorbing the largest numbers of women, apart from the mainly feminine occupations of tailoring, dressmaking and millinery, have been from the outset clothing factories and woollen mills, boot and shoe factories, and printing and bookbinding works. Although it was said that the 'slightly higher wages' were one of the factors in the growing preference of women for work other than domestic, the rates of pay, and the conditions of work that obtained do not now seem very attractive bait. A girl entering the boot and shoe trade for instance started at the age of fourteen, and worked nine hours a day for a weekly wage of two and sixpence for the first year. The workshops were cold and miserable, and the work was heavy—old treadle machines, stuck away in any corner of the shop where space could be found. In the printing trade the hours were similar but the wages rather better, particularly in the North Island, where a healthful influence seems to have been exercised by the Government Printing Office. A girl in this trade might start at as much as five shillings a week. In a few years, and with increasing skill, a woman could earn on the face of it as much as any domestic help (always excepting the favoured cook), and her hours would at least be regular, though the possibility has always to be remembered that she was carrying at least a part of the domestic burden in her own home. She had too to provide her own food, whereas the domestic's board was found for her in addition to the wages quoted. Many of the trades too employed a system of piece-work, and women frequently worked in their own homes, especially after marriage.
Tailoring, dressmaking and millinery still supply employment for a large number of New Zealand women, as they have done from the earliest years. The story of the sweating of tailoresses, which gave rise at the end of the eighties to the Tailoresses' Union, is told by Mr J. T. Paul in his little book Our Majority, written to celebrate the twenty-first anniversary of the Union's birth. To that story readers are referred. The conditions there described are appalling; and they were hardly better in the allied trade of dressmaking. In 1895 a girl, starting her life's work at fourteen, received no pay whatever for the first twelve months. In her second year her wage was two and sixpence; but even this was not a certainty— if work was short she might have three or four months' enforced holiday. At the end of four years this girl, who became a very well-known dressmaker in one of the chief cities, was skilled enough to be put in charge of a table—and her wage had risen to eight shillings. Yet women continued eagerly to seek such work. In 1901 there were 2,865 employed in the dressmaking and millinery trades alone, more than twice as many as in the tailoring and shirtmaking, which had now for some ten or eleven years been protected by their union. There was a Factory Act— 'Bradshaw's', the Employment of Females Act, 1873, amended in 1874, 1875, 1881, 1884 and 1885— which aimed at guarding the interests of all women working in trades and industries; in 1894 a woman was appointed an Inspector of Factories, the first woman inspector in New Zealand; but these measures would seem to have failed for too long in their purpose. If these were the conditions which so many women preferred to domestic service, there must have been more hardship in the latter than we are likely ever to know.
Of the 'professions' as distinct from the 'trades,' that of teaching has always been the one which has attracted New Zealand women in the largest numbers, and the one to which their right of entrance has been, apart from nursing, the least disputed. The women teachers have possibly always outnumbered the men in New Zealand as in other countries; by 1896 they did so by more than two to one; in 1926, the latest date for which full figures have been accessible, the proportion was much the same, although in 1921 it appears to have been more like three to one. The position created by the war had probably not at that date altogether adjusted itself.
The establishment of schools was always among the first cares of any group of settlers in New Zealand; and much valuable work was done also in the homes of those who had themselves received a good education. From these homes came many of the young women who later conducted the various excellent private schools for girls, some of which, though with other names and altered constitutions, are still recognised as among the best in the Dominion. Education was an important part of the plans for colonisation. But although the earliest schools, which were in the first instance all supported in part by one or other of the different churches, were attended by girls in numbers almost equal with the numbers of boys, it was of course the education of the boys that the founders of the colony had in mind. The education of girls after the primary school stage was left to the private schools, many of which, being in the hands of the most eager and enthusiastic women, were well equal to the task, and splendidly prepared the way for what was to follow. But when the University of New Zealand, rather casually than of set purpose, left its door ajar, and women walked in, the movement for the 'higher education' of girls was fairly begun. Girls' High Schools began to be established in the principal towns, and the first young women graduates were appointed to their charge. It was not all plain sailing; the quarters provided were terribly cramped, and, as was to be expected, there was plenty of opposition from public opinion, and not only male opinion. All kinds of evils were foreseen. The schools, nevertheless, grew rapidly and rapidly increased in numbers; and although even now from time to time an antediluvian doubt still raises here and there its heavy head, there is no serious question of the value of girls' as distinct from boys' education. All that is needed is enormously to improve both.
The first nurses in New Zealand were probably largely untrained except by nature and experience; they were able nevertheless to do much good work. The conditions in which they had to struggle were difficult, and those in the country districts particularly had to suffer great hardship and overcome many obstacles, in order to bring what help they could to the sick, making long and difficult journeys over the inevitable rough unformed roads, bush tracks and dangerous rivers. As the towns grew and prospered, hospitals were established, training became possible, and nursing here as in other countries gradually became recognised as a high and honourable calling, followed, by the nineties, by well over a thousand New Zealand women. And in 1895 Mrs Grace Neill, who had for a year occupied the position of Inspector of Factories, became the first woman in the empire to be appointed an Assistant-Inspector of Hospitals, Asylums and Charitable Aid. The work done by her in improving the training of nurses and raising the status of the profession is still remembered with gratitude by the older New Zealand nurses. In spite of minute salaries, Spartan conditions, long hours and nerve-racking work, the profession is one that has drawn increasing numbers to its ranks; and all hospitals, public and private, have as a rule long waiting lists of would-be entrants. The establishment of the Plunket system and of the Karitane Hospitals has too provided an opportunity for many girls and women who might have found themselves hardly equal to the extremely arduous general training; and they, like other New Zealand nurses, are always assured of work in almost any part of the world.
It is now over forty years since New Zealand women began to enter the medical profession. The census figures of 1896 show that while there were in that year no women medical practitioners, there were seven medical students. Of these one qualified in that year but went to England for further study and experience, and a second in 1897, becoming the first registered medical practitioner of her sex in New Zealand. By the date of the next census (1901), six women were returned as practising medicine in various parts of the country, and five years later the number had been increased to twenty. Since then, in spite of a certain amount of prejudice, women have steadily made their way in this exacting profession and have for some years undertaken work not only as general practitioners but as pathologists, bacteriologists, radiologists and, notably, dietitians. Their number now is approximately seventy-five.
Dentistry has proved less popular with New Zealand women than medicine, although they appear earlier to have turned to it as a means of livelihood. According to the figures there were already in 1896 seven women dentists, a number which had increased in the following ten years to thirty-one. The next decade, however, showed a big falling off, to three in 1916, to be followed by an upward leap to forty-eight in 1926.
The law has hitherto attracted few women, although an enabling act was passed in 1896; but is apparently now coming to be regarded with more favour by girls in search of a profession; and within the last twelve months at least half a dozen young women have been admitted to the Bar. Since 1926 women have been eligible for appointment as Justices of the Peace, and many have held office and proved their worth. They are as a rule associated with the Magistrates in charge of the Children's Courts, but do not sit in the ordinary courts. Among the remits placed before the annual Conference of the Labour Party at Easter in 1939, was one recommending the appointment of a larger number of women justices. The same remit advanced the claim that the appointment of women as magistrates would be in the interests of the community as a whole, and in particular of women and children; and urged further that the formation of a corps of women police should be carried out with as little delay as possible. The committee of the Conference before which the remit came made the encouraging report that there was in fact nothing to prevent the appointment of women as magistrates, except the general lack of qualified persons, there being so few women in the legal profession. As more women become eligible and this sole bar to their appointment disappears, we may hope that the Government will take advantage of the service they could undoubtedly render. With regard to the question of women police, a statement had already been made to the Conference by the Minister in Charge of the Police Department that applications were actually then being called for; so that we may expect before long to hear more of this matter.
It is impossible to deal even so briefly with all the occupations of women in New Zealand. Women are found in all sorts of work, likely and unlikely; and to a certain extent this has been so from quite early days, though the field is now greatly enlarged. Even before the turn of the century the returns show a few women employed in such unexpected places as coach building and painting workshops, flaxmills, sawmills, iron and brass foundries, and chaff-cutting establishments, though it is impossible to say just what their work was in these unusual trades. The early returns do not distinguish between productive and administrative workers. Employers were supposed to include in their returns the numbers of productive workers only; but it appears that this rule was not certainly obeyed. Nevertheless, when in 1919 the regulations stipulated for. separate returns of employees engaged in administrative, productive and distributive work, we still find numbers of women in the 'productive' columns of such industries as have been mentioned.
In our own day the list of 'gainful' occupations followed by New Zealand women is of formidable length. It contains evidence that while by far the largest number are still engaged in domestic work (as cooks, kitchen, pantry and scullery maids, housemaids, 'generals,' charwomen and washerwomen, waitresses, companions and lady-helps), and in teaching and nursing, or as shop-assistants, there are also very large numbers in other occupations which have not always nor for very long been considered exclusively or even largely as fields for women. It is only within the last thirty or forty years that girls have in any number been clerks, book-keepers, stenographers and typists; they now hold these positions in banks, shops and offices, and in the Public Service, about 15,000 of them. In addition to being dentists and dentists' assistants, they are dental mechancis in numbers nearly equal to men; they are photographers, librarians and library assistants, bookbinders, printers, compositors, proofreaders; public accountants and auditors; architects; harness-makers and leather-workers generally; electricians; tin-smiths; silver-smiths, manufacturing jewellers, opticians and optical mechanics; manufacturing chemists; fishers and trappers; kauri-gum diggers and sorters. And large numbers are farmers and farm labourers, orchardists, market-gardeners, poultry farmers, fruit pickers and other agricultural and pastoral workers. This, of course, by no means completes the list; it is perhaps enough to show that the 'occupational' section of the census returns is full of interest and instruction. It may be well to quote the warning of the officer responsible for its compilation in 1921, who was evidently a little startled by the results he obtained. 'An examination of the table,' he wrote, 'shows occasionally the presence of females in occupations which are usually considered solely masculine. It is possible that some, or even most, of these are cases of incorrect statements in the original returns.' He was, however, constrained to admit that 'inquiries made in cases where opportunity permitted proved that a number of such unusual vocations were actually correct.'
The statistics do not of course reveal against what opposition women may have had to struggle to gain an entrance into these various trades and professions, nor in the face of how great discouragement they have kept a footing, however precarious. Nor can we be sure whether they are all really 'gainful' occupations. The war of 1914-1918 no doubt did much to open doors, some of which it has been found profitable to leave wide, and none of which it was possible entirely to close again.
As artists of whatever kind, the women of New Zealand stand, again, beside the men. The subject is more fully treated in another volume; and all that need or can be done here is to make some very general mention of the position. In music it need only be said that New Zealand women have held, and continue to hold, their own with the women of other countries. Every year some few make their way, to Australia, to England, and farther afield, and, whether as singers or as instrumentalists, have little difficulty in taking a place beside all but the very greatest. Many of them do not return to New Zealand; thus far there has been too little encouragement offered them to do so. We profess to be proud of them as New Zealanders, and crowd eagerly into the light they shed, we suppose, upon ourselves. We do not do enough, if they return, to make possible their continued shining. The art of painting too has found among New Zealand women many competent professors who have deserved better than they have very generally received. A comparatively few of these have sought, and obtained, recognition overseas; and the work of one, Miss Frances Hodgkins, has received the seal of the highest authorities. She is, actually, one of the older generation, and her later work is little known in her own country; nor is it likely that it would be very popular if it were known better. It shows, nevertheless, the marks of genius and of the true artist: it has never ceased to develop. Miss Hodgkins has not for many years lived in New Zealand.
In literature several New Zealand women have achieved distinction. Katherine Mansfield's name of course shines out above all others. Her early death was deplored by critics in England as dealing to English literature the greatest blow it had received since the death of Keats. She too showed that she possessed not only genius but the finest artistic sense—showed it not only in the rapid development of her performance through the few small volumes that appeared during her lifetime, but also in the power of self-criticism revealed in the letters and journals published after her death. There are competent novelists also among New Zealand women, though the really great New Zealand novel has yet to be written. Robin Hyde might have done it had she lived; her work too had still to reach its full maturity; and there are others still working who have already won distinction and may yet achieve greatness. A slightly more restricted field has been entered with easy triumph by Miss Ngaio Marsh, whose detective novels are more than competent and have gained for her a reputation beyond our own narrow shores. Poetry in New Zealand developed earlier than the other arts, and there have always been women able to take their place beside the men. In the older tradition Jessie Mackay's small fierce flame, unquenched by years and the body's frailty, made her name known and honoured outside New Zealand; while in our own day the work of Miss Eileen Duggan, of much power and beauty, has begun to make its way in the greater world, and is not yet done. Last and greatest, Miss Ursula Bethell need fear comparison with none. Her spacious scholarship, wide humanity, and delicate perceptiveness have been, with exquisite craftsmanship, transmuted into poetry at once rich in content and finely austere in form. Hers is the most individual voice in New Zealand literature to-day: no other woman's, and only one man's, can compare.
6Women in Association
For Some Time the women of New Zealand were too much scattered, possibly they were too busy with the first stages of home-making and management and with the rearing and, under great disadvantages, the education of their children, to look very far beyond their own doors. The problems which they had to face were mainly domestic. All too soon, however, occasion arose; and in 1863 what appears to have been the first association of women in New Zealand was formed, in Onehunga, to assist the many families of refugees who were forced to leave their homes in the districts mainly affected by the Maori wars and to seek the shelter and protection of the township. The Onehunga Ladies Benevolent Society was founded at a public meeting convened by Mrs E. George, one of the pioneer women of Auckland, whose energy and enterprise were reflected not only in her successful business activities in Onehunga, but in the force and effectiveness of her appeal on behalf of these homeless and largely destitute people. Her presentation of their case won the support of all the ministers of religion in the district, and the women of their congregations threw themselves whole-heartedly into the work. In its earlier years the Society was often in difficulty— the claims upon it were so many and so great. But the work its members did aroused so much sympathy that the Society, which still exists and functions with, of course, a wider object, has for many years been in a sound financial position, with an annual revenue sufficient to meet all the demands of its work.
It is probable that similar associations, with similarly charitable ends, were formed in other parts of New Zealand before very long. In spite of our largely justified boast that we have in this country no extremes of wealth and poverty, there have been times in our history when too many people have suffered long periods of distress. Much of the resulting charitable work has been undertaken by the churches, and a great part of it has been actually carried out by the women.
Work of a different kind, and of particular interest to women since it is not only carried out by, but especially directed towards, the women and girls of New Zealand, was started as early as 1878 when the Young Women's Christian Association was founded in Dunedin, the first organisation of this now very large international body to be formed in the southern hemisphere. Within its first year, which closed with a membership of 230, the Dunedin Y.W.C.A. was affiliated with the London Association. The formation of other associations followed, in Auckland in 1886, in Christchurch, after one or two more or less abortive efforts from 1883 onwards, in 1901, and in Wellington in 1906. The following year these associations united with the associations in Australia to form a combined National Movement of the Y.W.C.A. of Australia and New Zealand, an arrangement which lasted until 1926. During this period the work in both countries developed very greatly, and greatly increased its scope. In 1919 a New Zealand Dominion Committee was established, under the National Board of Australia and New Zealand, to enable the associations in this country to function more efficiently, and to permit of a greater concentration on their own local problems. As a result of the larger measure of freedom and the greater elasticity thus secured, Y.W.C.A. work in New Zealand spread to several of the smaller towns; and at a Convention held in Otago in 1926 representatives of nine associations met and constituted themselves the Y.W.C.A. of New Zealand, as a National Movement separate from that of Australia, applying for and receiving direct affiliation with the international body, the World's Committee. Not the least valuable aspect of the Association's work has been its constant emphasis on internationalism. The geographical isolation of New Zealand has made direct contact with the associations in other countries difficult and rare; but no opportunity has been missed, and the girls and women who come within the influence of the Y.W.C.A. of the Dominion are never allowed to forget their sisterhood with the girls and women of all other nations and races. Several Secretaries are maintained in India, China, Burma and Malaya; and one of the immediate hopes and purposes of the Association is to bring Maori women and girls more directly within the orbit of its work.
The work was started with a definitely religious bias, and this it has of course always retained. The Association is, however, not only international but interdenominational. It is religious in no narrow sense. Its methods have changed with the changing years, and it rejects no form of activity which may bring to its members a full participation in life, offering them through its numerous clubs every opportunity by means of regular lectures and discussions of increasing their knowledge and their capacity for clear and honest thinking; while every kind of sport, many crafts, and various forms of social intercourse, find their proper place in its programme.
Another body to which the women of New Zealand owe much is the Women's Christian Temperance Union, which was founded in May 1885 and spread rapidly throughout the country. Its formation was the result of a visit from a member of the original organisation in the United States of America. So ready was the response to her representations as to the work that women could perform in the community, that by the end of the year nine branches of the W.C.T.U. had been formed in New Zealand; and at the first annual meeting of the national body, in 1886, fifteen were reported, with a total membership of 528 women. The movement now (1939) consists of one hundred and fifty-nine branches, and its members number 5,417.
Instituted originally with the main object of working for the abolition of the liquor traffic, the W.C.T.U. from its inception has interested itself in every kind of social reform. It did not neglect relief and educational work; but it quickly recognised that until women should be enfranchised their power to influence legislation would be extremely limited, and this most speedy method of effecting the many reforms they desired, denied them. In the first years of its existence therefore the W.C.T.U.'s most important work may be said to have been its campaign for the Women's franchise. The story of this campaign is told in some detail in the Outlines of the Women's Franchise Movement by Mr W. S. Lovell-Smith, and cannot be retold here. It lasted for seven years, and was carried on under the extremely clear-sighted, patient and determined leadership of Mrs K. W. Sheppard, the 'Superintendent' of the Union's franchise department. Actually the question of the enfranchisement of women in New Zealand had been raised many years before by Mrs Mueller, of Nelson, whose pamphlet, An Appeal to the Men of New Zealand, published in 1869, was the culmination of a series of letters and articles printed in the Nelson Examiner. But although Mrs Mueller's work won the approval of John Stuart Mill in England, and of others, men of some influence, in the colony, there was at that stage of New Zealand's settlement very little if any chance of forming any combination of women; and it was this combination which was the effective factor, since it answered the final argument of opponents of the movement, in at last carrying the day against all opposition.
This, involving so much else, is perhaps the most important work done for New Zealand women by the W.C.T.U. But the Union did not rest content with this great triumph. It regarded it indeed as only the first, essential step in its career; and a great deal of the work that lies behind the social legislation of the years since the granting of the franchise in 1893 has been initiated by the W.C.T.U. It was instrumental in securing many years ago the passing of the Infant Life Protection Act, and the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts; and it did not cease to work for the raising of the age of consent, the raising of the marriage age, the appointment of women Justices of the Peace, the admission of women to Parliament, universal pensions, invalid pensions, the equal rights for mothers of the guardianship of children, and the appointment of women police, until these measures were, some of them only very recently, embodied in New Zealand legislation. Itself an international organisation, one of the main planks in its platform has always from the very beginning of its existence been the settlement of international disputes by arbitration. If it has not yet succeeded in achieving this one of its objects it is not because it has lost either faith or hope; its work for it still continues.
The campaign for the franchise initiated by the W.C.T.U. gave rise to several other associations of women throughout New Zealand; and Franchise Leagues were formed in all the main centres. The members of these leagues did excellent work, both in educating women to a sense of their responsibilities, and in obtaining signatures to petitions designed to secure for them their rights. They had to fight against ignorance and indifference among members of their own sex; and although they received the support of more liberal-minded men both within and without the House, they were subjected to the most stupid ridicule by some who ought to have known better. The writer of the column entitled Search Lights in the Christchurch Press of that time for instance was allowed to make fun of them in a way that now, less than fifty years later, appears simply the grossest vulgarity. If it illuminated anything at the time, it can have been only the absurd weakness of the opposition cause; to read it now, recognising the utter impossibility of any respectable paper's printing such stuff in our own day, throws a clear light on the extent to which, in spite of doubts that may arise, woman's position in the community has been strengthened.
Although the end for which the Franchise Leagues had been formed was achieved before the election of 1893, there was still plenty of work for them to do; and during the next few years their number was largely increased. In the New Zealand Liberal and Labour Associations' Directory of 1897 a list of Women's Associations is given which shows them to have been in that year at least fourteen. Some of these were apparently not very long-lived. After the first excitement of effort and achievement, enthusiasm inevitably lapsed to a certain extent. Moreover the immediate necessity was no longer so obvious. Some of these associations, however, were continued for a matter of ten years or more; others, as divergences of political opinion made themselves evident (the question of the franchise was never a party one), split up and gave birth to new associations; yet others have remained, though sometimes with a change of name, active to this day.
Much of the work performed by these various leagues and unions was educational. The Women's Social and Political League of Wellington may be considered as typical. It was apparently founded in the year following the granting of the franchise; and its object was declared to be 'the promotion of knowledge amongst the women of the Colony with respect to social, political, municipal, and other questions affecting their well-being.' With this general end in view, more particular objectives were contained in its published 'platform.' These included the amendment of the laws affecting marriage, divorce, and the custody of children, to give women absolute equality with men in the control of such matters; the more equitable adjustment of women's wages and their hours of labour; the appointment of women as Inspectors of Asylums and of Industrial Schools, as managers of Labour Offices, and as members of Municipal Councils, Hospital and Charitable Aid Boards, Education Boards, School Committees, Licensing Committees, and other local bodies; and the submission to the electors of 'all great political and social questions admitting of a simple clear expression of opinion,' the decision of the majority to be final for a period of not less than three years. Finally it was resolved 'That in all political and municipal contests the support of the League shall only be given to men and women of pronounced progressive opinions, of integrity of character, and who are prepared to subscribe to the Platform of the League.'
The keen interest of its members is proved by the fact that in the first year of the League's existence no fewer than fifty-one meetings were held, and none ever lapsed for want of a quorum. At these meetings papers were read and their subject-matter discussed; and such varied questions received attention as Socialism, Anarchism, Party Government, Rates and Taxes, Old Age Pensions, Protection and Free Trade, Domestic Servants and a State Labour Bureau, Land Tax, the Nationalisation of Music, Charitable Institutions, and Cremation. Several of the meetings were open ones, to which men were admitted. Resolutions were passed and forwarded to the Government; and as there was much correspondence between the League and similar associations in other towns, it is probable that there was an understanding among them as to which should be the measures most immediately urged. From what it has been possible to learn of these kindred leagues, it is evident that they were working for the same general ends and for many of the same particular objects. It seems reasonably certain that the unanimity they displayed, and the persistence with which they showered their resolutions upon the Government, had their effect upon the statute book. Before the end of the Wellington League's first year it had the encouragement and satisfaction of seeing the establishment, in direct response to its representations, of a Government Labour Bureau for Women.
If in other matters it was less immediately successful, and some of its early objectives (notably the formation of a domestic servants' union, and the general use of the referendum) have not yet been reached, it will nevertheless be seen that its hopes, and the hopes of its sister associations, have in the main been realised, and that by far the larger number of the injustices it set itself to remedy have long since vanished. It is true that prejudices still exist which handicap women when they set out to claim the measure of equality won for them by the inflexible striving of these early associations. But that is largely the fault of women themselves, who in New Zealand, from whatever causes, have not been quick nor urgent enough to take advantage of the position secured.
The leagues of women in different parts of New Zealand began before long to feel a need for a closer association with one another. In 1896 representatives of eleven of these leagues met in conference in Christchurch; and at that meeting the National Council of Women of New Zealand was constituted. Its main objects were two, the first, of very wide and general application, the second, with a more particular reference. They were: (i) to unite all organised societies of women for mutual counsel and co-operation, and for the attainment of justice and freedom for women and all that makes for the good of humanity; and (ii) to encourage the formation of societies of women engaged in trades and professions and in social and political work, in connection with which no organised union then existed. There was to be no interference with the work of local organisations; but it was felt that a federal society could better give expression to those wishes of the affiliated associations which concerned not local affairs but the position of the women of the colony as a whole. In 1899 the National Council was seeking an even wider association and became itself affiliated with the International Council of Women.
Conferences were held annually at one or other of the four main cities. The matters dealt with were of course those for which the constituent associations were working. They were predominantly political, but there was a ban on questions peculiar to one or other of the political parties. There can be little doubt that the Council was effective in giving expression to the women's point of view, and that it must have made itself felt in a measure that would have been impossible to the unfederated societies. When in 1902 it ceased to function, together with many of the affiliated associations which had given it birth, it was not only because of the admitted waning of political enthusiasm among the women, but also because, under the liberal administration of the Seddon government, so many of their objects had been achieved. The Council remained in abeyance until 1918. Then, perhaps owing to the further extension of the sphere of women's activities which came about during the war, it was resuscitated; and having the same primary aims as the earlier Council, that is, 'to unite all organised Societies of Women for mutual counsel and co-operation, the attainment of justice and freedom for women, and all that makes for the good of humanity,' with the further object of forming 'a link with the National Councils of Women in other countries through the International Council of Women,' it has now fourteen branches in New Zealand, representing 237 societies and a membership of 145,000 women.
One of the main objects of the older National Council was, as has been said, to encourage the formation of societies of women engaged in trades and professions—of trades unions for women. Actually the only separate and specifically women's trade union in New Zealand had been formed some years before the Council or any of its constituent associations came into existence. This is the Tailoresses' Union, to which reference has already been made. It was founded in Dunedin in 1889; and the improvement in the working conditions of its members which it was able immediately to make brought home to women the value of such associations of workers. Not only this, but the scandalous revelations which led to its formation drew attention to the position of women workers generally. Unions in this particular trade were formed in all the main centres, and in July 1891 they were federated under the name of the New Zealand Federated Tailoresses' Unions. There was still much work to be done before decent conditions were obtained. The fortunes of the later formed Tailoresses' Unions varied in the different centres; the fight was hardest in Auckland. But the original Union of Dunedin was most generous in its help, and at last the uphill battle was won.
Attention having been drawn to the way in which the tailoresses had been sweated, enquiries began to be made into the conditions of work in other trades in which women were employed. Gradually as the years went on, although no other separate women's unions were formed, women workers were brought within the awards governing their trades; and the Factory Acts contain clauses specially directed to their protection. The domestic servant in private employment alone remains, poor Cinderella, outside the law. That other law, of supply and demand, has no doubt worked greatly in her favour; but it is always liable to be fickle in its operation; it cannot offer the security that should be hers.
Regard being had to the fact that so many of these major improvements in the position of New Zealand women were made during the tenure of office of the liberal Seddon government, the question may be asked whether after all the women themselves, and their associations had much to do with the matter. The answer was supplied by Seddon himself a few years before his death. 'In the legislation of which we boast,' he said, 'in the great social advancement we have made … I say that the women are behind it all; and I say more: that in respect of progressive measures, in respect of that which is for the good of the lives of others, women are keener and more determined than the lords of creation.'
Among the earlier, but non-political, associations of women in New Zealand were the Girls' Friendly Society and the Mothers' Union. The G.F.S. is a Church of England society, a branch of which was formed in New Zealand in the eighties, less than ten years after the foundation of the parent body in England. It was for many years of great service to young women immigrants; but was later overshadowed by the rapid spread of the Y.W.C.A., whose aims are similar, but whose doors are open to a much wider membership. The G.F.S., however, continued to exist and function for the benefit of its members; and it has in the last few years steadily regained strength, having branches in every diocese throughout the country. The attainment of its ideal of imperial and international fellowship is at present hampered by lack of a central Dominion organisation, a lack which the officers of the society hope shortly to be able to supply. The Mothers' Union is another association of women functioning within the Church of England. It too has existed in New Zealand since the eighties, has many branches and a large membership in every diocese, and is directly of English derivation. The educational value of both the G.F.S. and the Mothers' Union is considerable; and both, with their high ideals of personal responsibility and of fellowship, may exercise an influence beyond their own closes. These are probably the most widely known of church associations of women; others exist, of course, and not only in the Church of England, which must be passed over with this sole brief reference.
The organisations of women in New Zealand having a later origin are so numerous that only a few can be considered, and those but shortly. Of these one of the largest consists of the Women's Institutes Movement which, founded only twenty-one years ago, now has close on nine hundred branches, representing a membership of 40,000 women. The Institute movement is unique in that it is solely, and strictly, for country women, the formation of an Institute being permitted, by the rules of the organisation, only in a place with fewer than 4,000 inhabitants. Its purpose is fundamentally educational, its general aim being 'to improve and develop conditions of rural life.' Wherever possible instruction is given to its members in domestic science, hygiene, social welfare, handicrafts, and domestic and rural economics. Work in drama, literature, and music is encouraged. The movement is strictly non-party and non-political and topics of a controversial nature, likely to cause friction and division among members, are debarred. But it aims through its training to enable countrywomen to be intelligently interested in all questions, and to take their part outside the Institute in the discussion and solution of problems necessarily controversial.
The Women's Institute Movement had its origin in Canada. It has spread rapidly wherever it has been introduced, and its membership in New Zealand shows that this country has been no exception. It is obviously filling a need in the lives of country women; and it is claimed for it that already the standard of culture among them has by its agency been raised. In the more isolated and more scattered districts its influence must of necessity be slower in operation; and everywhere much depends on the members themselves. The question of how far its admirable aims are yet being achieved may perhaps best be left to the consciences of the individual Institutes.
With a similar educational object, a counterpart to the Women's Institutes exists in the Dominion Federation of Townswomen's Guilds. This is an association of very recent origin, the first Guild having been formed only in 1932; but the Federation now has at least fifteen constituent Guilds, and the total membership is calculated at something over 2,000 women. The object of these associations is to do for women in the towns what the Institutes would do for country women—they are, that is, a part of the general movement towards adult education.
In some ways allied to the Institute movement is the Women's Division of the Farmers' Union. It was born less than fifteen years ago in 1925 at a meeting attended by twenty-two women, wives and daughters of farmers in conference. In 1937 its recorded membership was over 17,000, with 500 branches and 28 Provincial Executives. Its original aim was to mitigate as far as possible the isolation in which many farm women were still obliged to live, and to afford them some assistance in times of sickness and trouble. Its Housekeeper Scheme, by which a farmer's wife may, when she requires it, secure the help for a week or more of a reliable woman, was one of its early and most interesting attempts to lighten the load of the country woman; and the Division is apparently able in this way to keep some fifty or sixty women in continuous employment. Sewing women too are available through the Provincial Executives; and in some districts tutors in dressmaking hold well-attended classes. A book club was also one of the first schemes to be put into operation, and performed a genuine service to the farm women; and social functions are held, and friendships made and cultivated. During the last few years the W.D.F.U. has widened the scope of its interests, and at its annual conferences remits have been introduced dealing with social and political questions affecting the country as a whole, so that the Division has begun to take over some of the functions of the earlier women's associations that have been mentioned. Resolutions regarding matters of such national moment as immigration, education, birth control, have been moved and vigorously debated, and in some instances the Government has been approached. This extension of the original purpose of the Division has been by some members resented and opposed; but it is an encouraging reversal of the usual process—women's associations in New Zealand tend to start with high aims and degenerate into tea-parties.
These are all large organisations. Perhaps the largest of all, however, is the Pan-Pacific Women's Association, of which there is a New Zealand National Committee, made up of representatives often associations of women, including the Women's Institutes and Townswomen's Guilds, the W.D.F.U., the W.C.T.U., and the Y.W.C.A., themselves all large bodies. The Pan-Pacific Women's Association had its origin in a suggestion made in 1924 by a New Zealander, though not a New Zealand woman, and held its first conference in Hawaii in 1928. Further conferences have followed in 1930, 1934 and 1937, and the fifth was to have been held in New Zealand in 1940. The stated objects of the Association are '(a) To strengthen the bonds of peace among Pacific people by promoting a better understanding and friendship among the women of all Pacific countries; (b) To initiate and promote co-operation among the women of the Pacific region for the study and betterment of existing social conditions.' New Zealand's geographical position has its disadvantages as well as its advantages. Participation in conferences such as these, even if the vast majority of individual members must participate at second hand, should help to correct the parochial attitude of which New Zealanders, men and women, have been accused since the sixties. The number of women in the delegation which New Zealand is able to send to any conference overseas is not large; but the organisation of the Association is very thorough and farreaching; at the close of each conference a tentative programme for the next is drawn up, and the 'corporate' and 'associate' members of the National Committee in any country have ample opportunity to study the questions proposed. Among the topics discussed at the last Conference, held in Vancouver in 1937, were the traffic in arms; population pressures; the technique of developing public opinion; youth movements for peace; the traffic in women and children; socialized health; the adjustment of educational programmes to changing social and economic relationships; and labour standards and standards of living. The exchange of experience and views on such subjects should be of the greatest possible value to all taking part. Many women's associations in New Zealand are international organisations: membership of the Pan-Pacific Women's Association enables them to recognise their internationalism, and the internationalism of their major interests, in a way that was not before possible.
Obviously there is no lack of women's organisations in New Zealand; obviously too there are many that do excellent work. It has not been possible in this brief survey to deal with more than a small part of the total number, nor to deal adequately with any. Those have been mentioned which seem to have their ramifications most widely set; but many others, such as the New Zealand Federation of University Women, and the New Zealand Women Teachers' Association, do work for women beyond the bounds that might appear to be implicit in their tides. Much has admittedly been achieved; but Seddon's words spoken in 1903 constitute not only a tribute to the New Zealand women of his own time: they are also a challenge to the New Zealand women of to-day.
'Honours thriveWhen rather from our acts we them deriveThan our foregoers.'
Postscript: Since1940
It has not been found possible to include references to this postscript in the index which is reproduced from the original edition.
It is More than twenty years since this book was first published. But twenty years is a short span in the life of a country; and if the position of women in New Zealand has not in that period altered in any spectacular way, that is not to be wondered at nor greatly deplored. There were spectacular advances in the past: the success of the Women's Franchise Movement in 1893; the, possibly undesigned, admission of women to full membership of the university in the seventies. For the most part, however, the advancement of the women of New Zealand into a wider and fuller life has been quiet and largely unremarked (and in line with that of women in most other countries). And it has been built on the devoted pioneering work of those women of the late years of last century and the early years of this, mentioned in chapter 6.
Properly, the vast majority of New Zealand women find their careers in marriage, and most regard this as a full-time occupation. War conditions, however, inevitably tempted many to retain their jobs after marriage, and others, already married, to return to theirs. The number of women in industry is steadily increasing, and this is certainly not wholly accounted for by the increase in the total population. It is probably the chief reason for the growing shortage of domestic help in private houses (for private domestic service is still without benefit of Union rule); and this in turn probably explains, at least in part, the improved attitude of public opinion towards the "amenities" desirable, if not altogether necessary, in household equipment. It would appear, from the latest figures available, that well over half the houses of New Zealand now have, for example, refrigerators, and that even more have washing-machines. No doubt most of these are in the towns and cities; but even in the country many houses, individually or in groups, have generating plants; and the rapid development of public electric works and supply may give soundly based hope for the lightening of labour to many country women still working in comparatively primitive conditions.
During the 1939-1945 war women became eligible for enlistment in all three services of the armed forces; and later the WRNZNS, the NZWRAC, and the WRNZAF, all became permanent parts of the Navy, the Army, and the Air Force. The aggregate number of service women rose sharply from 18 in 1940 to a peak of 7942 in 1944, declined to 435 in 1948, and since then has fluctuated by several hundreds from year to year, standing in 1958, according to the latest Official Year Book, at 619. They were not sent overseas; but if war had reached this country directly no doubt they would have been given such semi-combatant duties as were performed by women in England and elsewhere.
Applications by women for enrolment in the Police Force were invited early in 1939, and towards the end of 1941 the first 10 trainees took up their duties. Women police now number about 50, stationed in eleven of the larger cities. They are concerned mainly with work among women and children, but some few find employment in the C.I.B.
It would seem that there is now no trade or profession absolutely closed to women in New Zealand, though prejudice may still be a factor in keeping their ranks thin in some of the "higher" professions, such as medicine and the law. The full medical course at the University of Otage is, like all other university courses, open to women, as is that in dentistry; but the numbers of girls taking advantage of these opportunities are not large, averaging about 50 in a total of 520 medical students, and only about 5 in a total of 140 students of dentistry. The Government's School Dental Service, however, provides occupation for many girls who, after a two-year course of training, are posted to dental clinics in the primary schools. Many of them no doubt marry and may be lost to the service; but the number in training at any one time being about 400, their places are soon filled.
Law still attracts a few women students to degree courses each year; architecture a very few. And the founding of the Library School in 1946 meant opportunities for a restricted number of students to train for a profession the full demands of which are at last being recognized in New Zealand. Many women find in this work a useful and satisfying career.
It is pleasing to note that all the arts—music, drama, literature, and painting—have over the last few years been greatly encouraged, and that women have shared fully the help afforded by succeeding governments. Bursaries in music, drama, ballet, and painting, give opportunities for the furthering of study and training overseas and at home; the New Zealand Literary Fund makes grants which enable writers to carry out approved work; and the National Orchestra, that brave and most movingly successful venture, formed under the NZBS in 1946, allows women as well as men to make of their art a full-time profession in a way more satisfying than was ever before possible. And the heads of the Broadcasting Service are, most laudably, not deterred by an annual excess of expenditure over receipts. The number of women (and men) who are thus in every sense profitably employed is necessarily small, membership of the Orchestra varying, but being generally not more than 70. About one in four is a woman. But the fillip given to music and to musical appreciation by its foundation and its performances has been great. Already, smaller orchestras and groups of instrumental players have been formed in many places (the Universities deserve their meed of gratitude for these), a Junior National Orchestra is in its second year, and the formation of city symphony orchestras may with some confidence be looked for in the immediate future. The position complained of on page 163 has been largely, and is likely to be increasingly remedied.
In the other arts no more can be said here than that women continue to do good work. Among the painters none approaches the stature of Frances Hodgkins, who died in 1947; and women writers have, I think it is true to say, not kept pace with men in the development of New Zealand literature that has been notable during the last twenty years. An exception to this perhaps too broad generalization should be mentioned: Janet Frame, who published in 1951 The Lagoon, a volume of short stories, and in 1957 Owls do Cry, a brilliant, profoundly moving, and profoundly disturbing, novel, remarkable both for its subject matter and for its literary quality. Readers are, however, referred to Mr E. H. McCormick's admirable short survey, New Zealand Literature, which makes further comment here superfluous.
For whatever reason women in New Zealand have been slow to accept the opportunities offered them of taking their part in public life. There is still perhaps too much novelty, even notoriety, about a woman's appearing in a position of authority and influence—except, of course, in spheres which are traditionally women's, such as nursing, for example, and teaching. There are at present only three women representatives in Parliament (one of them, notably, a member of the Maori race), their number having been reduced from four by the recent death of the member for Hamilton.
By an act passed in 1942 it was made possible for women to serve on juries—possible but not obligatory. Since that date women between the ages of 25 and 60 who would be liable for service if they were men may apply to have their names placed on the jury list. But it was only during the early months of 1960 that a woman was called for service and was actually empanelled as a juror in the Supreme Court. It is worthy to note that she so greatly impressed her fellow-jurors (all men) by her bearing and capability, that for the second case that came before them they unanimously elected her their forewoman. Her example has since been followed by at least one other woman; and it may be hoped that before long a woman juror will be accepted as a normality, and without the rather deplorable flourish of Society trumpets that greeted this pioneering effort. Descriptions of the dress worn by the woman concerned subtly belittled the occasion, in a way that neither she nor the occasion deserved. There are as yet no women magistrates.
A few women have been appointed to official positions overseas. There is a woman attache in the office of the High Commissioner in Canberra, another in the New Zealand Embassy in Paris. A woman is First Secretary in the High Commissioner's office in London, and another Third Secretary in Malaya. More noteworthy is the fact that when in 1949 a New Zealand Legation was opened in Paris it was headed by a woman Chargé d'Affaires. She filled the position with distinction; and in 1955, on the Legation's being raised to the status of a Ministry, her services were retained, as Minister, until the following year when she was succeeded by a man.
There are women on School Committees and on Education Boards and on some other local bodies, but far too few; and far too few, considering the large numbers of women students, on University Councils. Marriage and its responsibilities are not enough to account for this—there should be more women in the higher age-groups capable of and willing to serve in such ways. There is altogether too much indifference in the matter among both women and men. Possibly some promise for the future lies in the fact that during the last few years younger women have been coming forward, taking a lead in founding Play Centres, and in Family Planning, and in moves towards the betterment of maternity services. Admittedly these are realms in which the regiment of women is least likely to be considered monstrous. Apart, nevertheless, from the intrinsically good immediate results achieved, an admirable training ground is in these ways provided for work in wider provinces, and another step is taken, forward towards the forts of prejudice (in women as well as men), which may with growing clearness be seen to be not entirely inexpugnable.
ChristchurchJune 1960
Some Sources
The General conditions in which the wives of the early missionaries had to live may be learnt from J. R. Elder's Marsden's Lieutenants (Dunedin, 1934); while interesting details are to be found in George Clarke's Notes on Early Life in New Zealand (Hobart, 1903), in Robert Maunsell, LL.D.,A New Zealand Pioneer (Dunedin, 1938), by Henry E. R. L. Wiley and Herbert Maunsell, and in Earliest New Zealand (Masterton, 1927), compiled from the journals and correspondence of the Rev. John Butler by R. J. Barton. The three volumes of Canon J. W. Stack's reminiscences, Early Maoriland Adventures (Dunedin, 1935), More Maoriland Adventures (Dunedin, 1936) and Further Maoriland Adventures (Dunedin, 1938), edited by A. H. Reed, carry the story on from 1833 to 1860, and are also very valuable; and the last, which is largely devoted to Mrs Stack's journals, is of particular interest for women and is concerned with a wider field than that of the missions. Most important of all from the woman's point of view and for the earlier years is Hugh Carleton's Life of Henry Williams(Auckland, 1874), which contains many extracts from Mrs Williams's diary. The diary itself is still in the possession of the Williams family, and I understand, that it is now being prepared for publication.
For details of the voyage to New Zealand I have had to rely mainly on private diaries and letters; but many useful and often diverting hints are to be found in the early numbers of the New Zealand Journal and in the Hand-Book for intending Emigrants to the Southern Settlements of New Zealand written by G. B. Earp (2nd edition, London, 1849). Neither of these, unfortunately, is very readily available.
Both the New Zealand Journal and Earp's Hand-Book are invaluable also for the letters they contain from earliest settlers. Although many most useful suggestions for a reconstruction of the early housewife's life are contained in several books dealing with pioneering days, I have again found some of the most valuable material in letters and records (as yet unpublished) in the possession of descendants of early settlers. Mrs Woodhouse's George Rhodes of the Levels (Christchurch, 1937) and the two volumes by Lady Barker, Station Life in New Zealand (London, 1870) and Station Amusements in New Zealand (London, 1873), may, however, be recommended among published works; while James Hay's Earliest Canterbury (Christchurch, 1915) and Mrs Innes's Canterbury Sketches (Christchurch, 1879) also contain much that is interesting. Tales of a Pioneer (Christchurch, 1927), selected and arranged from the papers of Alfred Saunders by two of his daughters, is valuable for its account of the founding of Nelson; and Mrs James Duff Hewett's Looking Back (2nd edition, St. Albans, 1914) gives some vivid details of life on a farm near Wanganui just before, and during the early days of, the Maori wars. Two privately printed works, Mrs Tripp's My Early Days, and Mrs Godley's Letters from Early New Zealand, are also extremely useful, but are not easily available. The volume of Mrs Godley's Letters is, indeed, among the best of all the sources. She was in an unique position, an active participant in the work of settlement, and yet not quite of it, since her stay was, she knew, to be a comparatively short one. She was, moreover, an intelligent observer and a lively writer. Another woman in a similar position, but at a later date, provides a commentary on New Zealand life in the early nineties. Mrs Robert Wilson, whose husband was in charge of the building of the south island Midland Railway, travelled over a great part of the country, and was here long enough to form reliable judgments. Her New Zealand journal, In the Land of the Tui (London, 1894), was published on her return to England. Less reliable, because obviously strongly biassed, opinions are to be found in an amusing little volume, Taken In (London, 1887), by 'Hopeful,' but the book is valuable, nevertheless, read in conjunction with others in which the views are less jaundiced. And as a woman the author supplies details of domestic life that are not found elsewhere. Unfortunately her book also appears to be rare.
The struggle for the franchise may be studied in W. S. Lovell-Smith's Outlines of the Women's Franchise Movement in New Zealand (Christchurch, 1905), and there are some interesting references in James Drummond's Life and Work of Richard John Seddon (Christchurch, 1906). Survivors among those who took part in the struggle have supplied lively and helpful information; but the main facts are contained in these two published works.
A Note on the Illustrations
The frontispiece (Work, 1846) is reproduced from a pen and ink sketch in the manuscript diary of William Bambridge in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. The map showing the districts of early missionary activity (p. 1) has been specially drawn for this edition by Mr Carl Watson of Hamilton. The Missionary Station at Paihia (p. 20) is from an engraving published in Dumont d'Urville's Voyage Pittoresque Autour du Monde (1834). The Ship 'Kenilworth' Outward Bound for New Zealand (p. 34) is a reproduction of a painting by J. C. Richmond, now in the possession of the National Art Gallery, Wellington. Dance on Board the Emigrant Ship, 'Randolph' (p. 52) is from a photograph in the possession of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. A Settler's Hut (p. 86) is from the water-colour original by William Strutt, a Taranaki artist of the 1850's. Reconstruction of a Cob House Kitchen (p. 106) is from a photograph of a reconstructed kitchen in the Canterbury Museum. A Musical Evening (p. 126) is from a photograph of a wood engraving in The New Zealand Graphic and Ladies' Journal of 13 September, 1890, now in the possession of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. A Taranaki Home (p. 138) is reproduced from a pencil sketch by J. C. Richmond, now in the possession of Mrs Bannister of Rotorua. Richmond was born in England in 1822, came to New Zealand in 1851, and settled in Taranaki. He was a notable figure in New Zealand public life, as well as a delicate draughtsman and a sensitive water-colourist.
IndexAccommodation, early settlers', 68, 80, 86, 89, 93–6; houses, 142–3Active, 1, 4, 4n., 11, 15Akaroa, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 134Amelia Thompson, 86Annals of a New Zealand Family, 121Appeal to the Men of New Zealand, 171Artists, 163–5Ashwell, Mrs B. Y., 26Auckland, 84, 88–90, 121, 122, 123, 124, 129, 130, 133, 140, 142, 166, 168, 179Aurora, 40, 71Baggage, passengers', 50–1Baker, Major, 73Balls and dances, 79, 94, 123–6, 127, 134Banks Peninsula, 97, 100–4, 108Barker, Lady, 135, 139Barrett's Hotel, 79, 123Bay of Islands, 1, 3, 4, 6, 14, 15, 16, 28, 121Bay of Plenty, 140Bazaars, 132–4Bethell, Miss Ursula, 165Births at sea, 49–50Blair of Maryport, 55Boot and shoe operatives, 153–4Boyd massacre, 2, 3Bradshaw's Act, 155Britannia (Wellington), 79Brown (missionary), 24Busby, James, 27, 121Busby, Mrs James, 28, 121Buder, Mrs John, 15, 16, 17Butler, Rev. John, 15, 16, 17, 18Buder, Samuel, 16Calling and visidng, 127–8Candles, 110Canterbury, 84, 92, 93–7, 106, 108, 125, 136, 137Canterbury Association, 40, 51, 92, 103Canterbury Papers, 96Carlisle, Mr and Mrs, 15, 16Chambers' Journal, 82Charities, 132–4, 166–7Christchurch, 97, 124, 125, 127, 130, 132, 149–50, 168, 176Christmas at sea, 54Church Missionary Society, 1, 2, 9, 12, 15, 16, 21n.Clarke, Rev. George, 21, 22Clarke, Rev. Mr and Mrs, 16, 22Cook, Captain James, 1 Cooking, difficulties of, missionaries, 12; on the voyage, 37; early settlers, 68, 78, 91, 93, 108–9Cospatrick, 59–60Cuba, 67Cunningham, Allan, 121Darwin, Charles, 121Davis, Mr and Mrs, 16Davis, Rev. Richard, 24Deans family, 136Deaths at sea, 48–9Dentists, 159Dillon, the Chevalier, 121Dinner-parties, 122–3Disasters at sea, 59–63Diversions on the voyage, 52–7Domestic servants, 74, 122, 128, 146–52; Union, 151, 176, 179; Training-hostels, 151Dress, 56, 58, 91, 97Dressmakers, 153, 154–5Duggan, Miss Eileen, 165Dunedin, 130, 167, 168, 178, 179Earthquakes, 78, 79, 80East Cape, 30, 89Education of girls, 156–7Emigrants, assisted, 35, 37, 42, 45–7, 48–9, 50, 51, 73–4, 145; unmarried women, 63–5, 74Equipment, for the voyage, 36–7, 46–7Factory Acts, 155, 179Fairburn, Mr and Mrs, 16Federation of University Women, 186Fires at sea, 59–63; in Wellington, 81Flea Bay, 98Food, in mission settlements, 11–12, 19, 28–9, 30; on the voyage, 38–42, 54–5; of early settlers, 70, 87, 91, 102, 108, 113Forsyth, Lake, 99Foveaux Strait, settlement on, 104Franchise Leagues, 172–6Franchise Movement, 170–1Franklin, Lady, 121French settlers in Akaroa, 98, 99, 100George, Mrs E., 166German settlers in Akaroa, 98, 100Girls' Friendly Society, 180–1Godley, J. R., 93, 94Godley, Mrs, 79, 94, 118, 119, 122, 123, 127Gordon, Mr and Mrs, 15, 16Government House, 121, 124, 127, 129–30Grey River, 138Hall, Mrs William, 3, 8, 9Hall, William, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 14, 17, 18Handbook for Intending Emigrants, 36, 40Hansen, Captain, 4Hansen, Mrs, 4Heathcote River, 97Hempleman, George, 98Hempleman, Mrs, 98Hewett, Mrs James Duff, Looking Back, 65Hobson, Captain, 89, 121Hodgkins, Miss Frances, 164Home-makers of earliest days, 105–116Homesickness, 118, 120Hone Heke, 27, 89Hongi, 4, 21, 22Horse-racing, 130–1Hospitality, 103, 121 ff., 134–9Hospitals and Charitable Aid Boards, Inspectors of, 158, 174Housekeeper Scheme, 183Houses, 5–6, 17–19, 28, 29–30, 31, 72–3, 78, 94–5, 97, 98, 100, 101, 106–7, 113Hutt valley, 66, 75; river, 68, 78Hyde, Robin, 165Inspector of Factories, Woman, 155, 158Inspectors of Hospitals, etc., Women, 158Isaac, Francis, 76Jackson, Mrs. Laura, Annals of a New Zealand Family, 121Jacob's River, settlement at, 104John Wickliffe, 92Jones, Miss (Mrs J. W. Stack), 140, 142, 143Justices of the Peace, 159–60, 171Karamea, 126Karitane Hospitals, 158Kemp, Mr and Mrs, 15Kendall, Mrs Thomas, 3, 8, 9, 16Kendall, Thomas, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14, 16Kerikeri, 16, 17, 20, 22, 23King, Captain, 88King, John, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9King, Mrs John, 3, 5, 8, 9Kororareka, 15, 24Labour Bureau for Women, 175Laundering, on the voyage, 45, 47, 64; in early settlements, 109, 148Lawyers, 159–60Leigh, Mr and Mrs, 15Libraries, 131Local Bodies, 174Looking Back, 65Lovell-Smith, W. S. Outlines of the Women's Franchise Movement, 170Lyttelton, 41, 127, 130Mackay, Jessie, 165Magistrates, 160Mair, Gilbert, 121Mansfield, Katherine, 164Maoris, relations with missionaries, 10–11, 14–15, 16–17, 19–24, 27, 29; with settlers, 71–2, 75, 81, 83, 85, 86, 99, 101, 137; conflicts with settlers, 85, 166Maraetai (Port Waikato), 31Marsden, Samuel, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20Marsh, Miss Ngaio, 165Matamata, 143Maunsell, Mrs Robert, 28, 29, 31–2Maunsell, Rev. Robert, 28, 29, 31Mayor Island, 140Meander, H.M.S., 124Mechanics' Bay, 89Medical practitioners, 158–9Milliners, 153Mokotoa (Manukau Harbour), 29Mosquitoes, 111, 143Mothers' Union, 180–1Mueller, Mrs, Appeal to the Men of New Zealand, 171Musical evenings, 126–7Musical societies, 131Musicians, 163–4National Council of Women, 176–8Neill, Mrs Grace, 158Nelson, 84, 90–2, 138, 142, 149–50, 171Nelson Examiner, 171New Plymouth, 84, 85–8, 142New South Wales, 3, 4New Zealand Associations, 34New Zealand Company, 34, 35, 36, 37, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 48, 63, 66, 67, 73, 76, 85, 90, 92, 104, 145New Zealand Federation of University Women, 186New Zealand Journal, 34–5, 36, 72 145New Zealand Liberal and Labour Association's Directory, 173New Zealand Women Teachers' Association, 186Novelists, 164–5Nurses, 153, 157–8O'connell, Mrs, 124Onehunga, 166Onehunga Ladies Benevolent Society, 166–7Otago, 84, 92, 93Our Majority, 154Outlines of the Women's Franchise Movement, by W. S. Lovell-Smith, 170Paihia, 7, 8, 16, 17, 18, 20, 22, 28, 121Pan-Pacific Women's Association, 184–6Papanui, 125Parramatta, Marsden's school for Maoris at, 4Paul, J. T., Our Majority, 154Peraki, 98Petone, 66, 68, 74, 123Philip Laing, 92Picnics, 128–9Pierce, Mr and Mrs, 68, 69Pigeon Bay, 98, 100–4Plantagenet, 56Plunket nurses, 158Plymouth Company of New Zealand, 85Poetry, 165Police, Women, 160Portable Colonial Cottages, 72–3, 113Port Jackson, 3, 4Port Nicholson, 34, 66, 67, 75, 85Poverty Bay, 140, 141Press, Christchurch, 172Prices, 70, 75–6, 77, 81, 110Printing-works, 154Puckey, Mr and Mrs, 15Purau, 98Queen Charlotte Sound, 98Queen's Birthday celebrations, 124, 129–30Rangihoua, 7, 8, 9, 20Red House Bay, 98Residency, British, 121Riccarton, 99–100, 130, 136Ruatara, 4, 7Russell, 121Rymill, Miss, 31St John's College, 89Schools, 6, 7, 13–14, 25–6, 156–7Search Lights, 172Seddon Government, 177, 179Seddon, Richard John, 177, 179–80, 186Selwyn, Bishop, 27Servants, domestic, 74, 122, 128, 146–52; native, 26Settlers, early, in Auckland, 88–90; on Banks Peninsula, 98, 100–4; in Canterbury, 93–100; at Jacob's River, 104; in Nelson, 90–2; in Otago, 92–3; in Port Nicholson, 67–84; in Taranaki, 85–8; at Waikouaiti, 104; in Wanganui, 84–5; life of women, 105–16Shepherd, Mr and Mrs, 15Sheppard, Mrs K. W., 170Ships, passing at sea, 55Shirtmakers, 153Shop-assistants, 153Shortland, Edward, 104Sir George Seymour, 41Sisters, 23Slush lamps, 110Soap-making, 109Social distinctions, 119–20Social reforms, 170–80Sod huts, 97, 106–7Stack, Canon J. W., 32Stack, James, 21n., 29Stack, Mrs James, 29, 32Stack, Mrs J. W., 140, 142, 143Steerage quarters, 44–5, 51Sumner, 96Surgeons, Ships', 48–9Swaggers, 136–7, 138Tajloresses, 153, 154; Union of, 154, 178–9Tamaki, 90Taranaki, 85–8, 142Tauranga, 140, 143Teachers, 153, 155–7Te Koki, 20Theatres, 131, 132Times, London, 61Tinder-boxes, 111Tory, 67Townswomen's Guilds, 182–3, 184Trades Unions, 178–9Travellings difficulties of, 139–44Turner, Mr and Mrs Nathaniel, 16, 22, 23Unemployment, 80–1, 89, 90Unions, Trades, 154, 178–9University of New Zealand, 151, 157University Women, Federation of, 186V-huts, 97Wages, 76, 87, 88, 149, 150, 152Waikato, 140, 143Waikouaiti, 104Wairau, 101Waitangi, 8, 9, 12, 28; Treaty of, 1, 34Wakefield, Colonel, 67, 75, 80Wakefield, E. G., 34Wanaka, Lake, 139Wanganui, 84–5Wellington, 79, 81, 83, 84, 90, 93, 100, 118, 122, 123, 124, 129, 130, 131, 142, 146, 168, 174Wesleyan Mission, 15, 16, 21Westport, 126Whalers, trading with, 102Whangaroa, 16, 21William Brown, 60–3William Bryan, 86Williams, Henry, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26Williams, Mrs Henry, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25–7, 28Williams, Mrs William, 26, 28Williams, William, 24, 28, 3on.Wives, demand for, 74, 146Women, in domestic service, 146–52, 161; in industry and trade, 152, 153–5, 161, 162; in the professions, 152, 155–60, 161–2; in the arts, 163–5; and social reform, 170–80Women's Christian Temperance Union, 169–72, 184 Women's Division of the Farmers' Union, 183–4Women's Institutes Movement, 181–2, 184Women Police, 160, 172Women's Social and Political League, 174–6Women Teachers' Association, 186Young Women's Christian Association, 167–9, 180, 184
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New Zealand in the MakingJ. B. Condliffe
When the first edition of New Zealand in the Making was published in 1930, it took its place immediately as the authoritative economic history of the Dominion. It is still set as a text by the University of New Zealand. In this new revised edition, Professor Condliffe has rewritten the book completely, and where necessary brought it up-to-date. On many historical developments, especially the economic development of the Maori people, the story is carried right up to the present day. The statistical material used has been carried to 1935, when the first Labour government came to power, and subsequent developments are treated in the author's new book The Welfare State in New Zealand. The extensive list of references to source material has also been brought up to date and will prove invaluable to students and subsequent research workers.
New Zealand in the Making is a fascinating study of the organized settlement, growth and development of a new country and tells how, after exploring many avenues, the settlers finally discovered where their economic prosperity lay, namely in the development of their pastures for sheep-raising and later dairying.
From the beginnings of settlement, a literate community was conscious of its destiny, and records—including statistics—were kept so that the economic development can be measured quantitatively. Professor Condliffe has brought order out of this mass of documentary material by applying the techniques of an economic analyst, but in so doing has lost neither the continuity nor the sense of adventure that has marked New Zealand development from the first projects of planned colonisation.
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New Zealand NowOliver Duff
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What it feels like to be a New Zealander in 1955 is not so very different from what it felt like in 1940. So essentially did the author distil the "New Zealandishness" of 1940 that it remains a remarkable portrait of this country fifteen years later. Moreover it is clearly of interest beyond the shores of New Zealand itself to all who have some curiosity about the life and affairs of the Commonwealth. This edition has a new preface and a postcript.
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The Welfare State in New ZealandJ. B. Condliffe
Professor Condliffe, during a recent prolonged visit to New Zealand as Consultant to the Reserve Bank, had an excellent opportunity to study recent developments in New Zealand at first hand and the result is the first complete appraisal of recent experimental legislation in the country which has probably gone furthest along the road to social welfare. This book, a sequel to his authoritative volume New Zealand In The Making, covers the whole period of experiment up to 1957. He tells how, during the period of the first Labour government (1935-49), great changes were made in social legislation, and attempts were made to stabilize the domestic economy behind the cover of exchange control and guaranteed export prices. He discusses how the social services were developed, local industries fostered, and the recent rapid increase in population. New Zealand's statistical records are among the best in the world and it is therefore an excellent laboratory in which to study the forces at work in economic development, international trade and social reform.
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The Long White CloudWilliam Pember Reeves
There are many historical works on New Zealand, but The Long White Cloud, which Pember Reeves wrote nearly fifty years ago, is still regarded as the best. It owes its reputation to its comprehensive scope, for its author viewed history as the record of the whole life of a people, not merely political and military, but including its economic, social and cultural ideas and activities, and its ethnological and physical background. It is also magnificently readable and holds attention by its clarity, wit, liveliness and gift for characterisation.
Pember Reeves was himself one of the actors in his own story; formerly a barrister and a journalist, he entered the New Zealand Parliament in 1887 and, after holding several ministerial posts, eventually came to London as Agent-General. For eleven years he was Director of the London School of Economics and was intimate with the Fabians of his day. He died in 1932. This fourth edition of his great work has been brought up-to-date by the addition of chapters by Dr. A.J. Harrop covering the history of New Zealand during the last fifty years. The book has also been re-illustrated with some splendid modern photographs of New Zealand landscape.
Demy 8vo. 25s. net
Unclimbed New ZealandJohn Pascoe
'A well written record of many interesting expeditions into the High Alps and lesser known ranges of New Zealand and a valuable addition to the literature of mountaineering. It should prove very useful to all contemplating a visit to the mountains of New Zealand as it gives much useful information on the conditions of travel both in the bush and on the high snows, together with notes on equipment … and the organization of rescue parties in the event of accident. The bibliography is proof of the growth of interest in New Zealand mountaineering, whilst numerous excellently reproduced photographs convey a clear idea of the manifold and varied beauties of the New Zealand Alps which are unquestionably one of the loveliest ranges of mountains within the British Empire.'—Frank Smythe.
Royal 8vo. 21s. net
Bengt DanielssonLove in the South Seas
Europeans generally associate the South Sea Islands with girls in grass skirts, endless dancing and an unquenchable joie de vivre. The natives are known to have free and lighthearted habits that even excite our envy. In this popular-scientific account of the sexual life and family relations of the Polynesians, Bengt Danielsson (one of Thor Heyerdahl's comrades on the famous Kon-Tiki raft) reveals the extent to which this widespread conception of the South Sea as a lovers' paradise is justified.
This comprehensive account—the first of its kind—is based on personal observation during years of travel and residence among various Polynesian peoples, as well as extensive literary research. Most of the descriptions quoted in the book are taken from older records of Polynesian habits and ideas in many languages that have not for the most part been available to English readers.
Love in the South Seas is written in an easy and entertaining style. It deals with a variety of matters such as aesthetic ideals and means of attraction, sexual education and the games played by Polynesian youth, the laws of marriage and marital fidelity, polygamy, and "unnatural" tendencies, religion, and the sexuality and social position of woman. The author's numerous parallels with conditions in Europe serve to enlighten in a new and rather unexpected way our own sexual problems.
Demy 8vo. 3rd Impression. 18s. net
The Happy Island
'Partly a serious report of the way of life of a simple people not yet wholly corrupted by the great world and partly a wonderful day-dream of escape … Strikes me as a certainty in the bestseller stakes. It is Arcadian, idyllic, a vision of the golden days, and very funny.'—News Chronicle.
'He is a thoroughly entertaining writer, a keen observer and an objective reporter with never an axe to grind…. He produces a narrative which has a quality that makes it nearly impossible to put down.'—Yorkshire Post.
'Entrancing book.'—Birmingham Gazette
Demy 8vo. 2nd Impression. 16s. net
Biographical Note
Helen M. Simpson (nee Richmond) was descended from distinguished pioneer stock. After a brilliant career at Victoria and Canterbury University Colleges, she won a scholarship to the Royal Holloway College where she gained a London Ph.D.
She had extensive experience as a teacher, and as a lecturer in English at the Christchurch Teachers' Training College and Canterbury University College. Later, she was a member of the Canterbury University College Council for many years. While on the Council she fought staunchly for any cause she considered morally right. In 1944, for example, she joined in an attempt to have a pacifist appointed to a lectureship. She was one of the Council's delegates to the Tutorial Class Committee of the W.E.A. until her death.
During the last years of Dr. Simpson's life, her husband's ill-health forced her to give up most outside activities. After his death in 1959 her own health failed and she died in November, 1960.
Dr. Simpson's links with the pioneering past, her extensive travels and her scholarship made her admirably equipped to write this sympathetic study of New Zealand women. But to her family and her friends her chief strength lay in her gentleness, her humanity and her great integrity. She typified the best in New Zealand culture and tradition.