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Ngā Tohuwhenua Mai Te Rangi: A New Zealand Archeology in Aerial Photographs

16 — Mission Settlements and Early Farming

page 243

16
Mission Settlements and Early Farming

There are localities where smaller-scale activities represent the nature of the early pastoral industry, particularly the small farm settlements. The most interesting examples are those of the missions founded by the Revd Samuel Marsden from 1814 in the Bay of Islands. These were initially set up to instruct in both religion and trades, the latter including farming. At first the settlements were coastal—reflecting both the dominant Māori wish that the settlements be for trade and the need for the mission settlements to have the security of rapid
'Te Puna, Bay of Islands ... a church missionary establishment'

'Te Puna, Bay of Islands ... a church missionary establishment'

Painted by Augustus Earle in about 1827, this view shows the slopes of Rangihoua to the left and the buildings of the mission settlement, right, apparently aligned end for end on the terraces visible in the aerial photograph.

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Rangihoua, on the northern shore and towards the entrance of the Bay of Islands

Rangihoua, on the northern shore and towards the entrance of the Bay of Islands

The transverse ditches of the pā show clearly along with a suite of terraces. At bottom left are trenches used for horticultural purposes. The pā is about 180 m long and 45 m across. By the stream at top is Te Oihi, site of the mission settlement. The view is to the east. The painting on the previous page shows Rangihoua and Te Oihi from seaward.

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Te Oihi, Marsden Cross, site of the first mission settlement of 1814

Te Oihi, Marsden Cross, site of the first mission settlement of 1814

Cutting horizontally across the earlier Maori horticultural trenches (running down from the forest edge) are the house terraces of the 1814 settlement. There is a prominent line (80 m across) at middle and single terraces to the left by Marsden Cross. The houses were linked to the beach by deeply eroded tracks which are clearly discernible. The view is to the north.

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Te Waimate, site of the Church Missionary Society farm and settlement, established in 1831

Te Waimate, site of the Church Missionary Society farm and settlement, established in 1831

The mission house (the first of three) and church are at the top left. In the fields to the south of the 'T' intersection of the roads are the foundations of other buildings, initially the later mission houses converted to colleges under Bishop Selwyn. The dam and race for the flour mill, built in 1834, are on the Waihirore Stream at bottom right. A distinct double line about 100 m north of and parallel to the main road is a ditch and bank fence. Plough marks of indeterminate age also show near the mill site. (Interpretative drawing over page.)

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Detail of 'The Waimate from Paheke Hill', a panorama of the mission station by T.B. Hutton. The colonial-Georgian form of the three mission houses with their hipped roofs is evident. At left is St John's (the second church on the site; the third, currently standing, was built in 1871); on this side of the church are the workers' tenements. The painting is c. 1850, following the actions by British troops. The view is to the north and the total span of the settlement seen here covers some 400 m.

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Oblique view to the south-east of the Te Waimate complex. St John's Church is in the foreground and the surviving mission house above centre. Curatorial buildings lie behind the mission house.

page 250 escape. Later, settlements were more readily tolerated by the Māori community and inland stations in the heartland of the Māori community were possible, for example, the Kerikeri basin (1819) or Te Waimate (1831).

The settlement at Te Oihi near the pā Rangihoua, in the outer Bay of Islands, was established by the Church Missionary Society in 1814, 1 and the Wesleyan (Methodist) mission at Kaeo was established in 1823. 2 Methodist Missions also developed farms in other regions, including the Aotea Harbour, whose agricultural features were discussed in chapter 8. Te Oihi (now known as Marsden Cross because of the memorial there) was established in an area of Māori settlement, and it appears the European party was offered just enough suitable land to settle but not enough to farm. Racked by conflict among the early missionary settlers, Te Oihi, the site of the first church services and school in New Zealand, failed after a few difficult decades. Both the Māori settlement and the modest terraces of the mission settlement, the latter packed up against the slope in a small bay, can still be seen. The pā, Rangihoua, is spectacular and has served as an archaeologist's model of how features seen on the ground today can be related to past activities, particularly since Augustus Earle sketched the habitations on it several times. 3 The pā dominates the small mission settlement, topographically and politically. The missionaries in turn appear to have established themselves on areas of former Māori garden shown by the down-slope trenches (of a type discussed in some detail in chapters 3 and 7) which lie above the house terraces of the small settlement.

In 1831, in the volcanic landscape of the inner Bay of Islands, the largest, most ambitious of the missionary agricultural settlements, Te Waimate (in the locality now known as Waimate North), was founded. 4 There three mission houses were built in 1831 under the supervision of a lay missionary, George Clarke. The mission houses were converted to colleges by Bishop Selwyn in 1842. Only one mission house, the largest of the three, still stands; the others survive as foundations in the fields but little is to be seen in aerial photographs. The present church was built in 1871 on the site of the preceding church (and that in turn was built on the site of a small chapel erected in 1831). On the agricultural side, a flour mill was set in operation in 1834; 5 its dam (some 85 m long) is still extant and shows clearly on aerial photographs. In 1845 the mission settlement was occupied by British troops as a base after the actions at Ohaeawai and Puketutu; a fortification was constructed just south of the colleges, and much damage done to the station. 6 The mill went out of use at some time in the 1850s, at about the same time that the mission station reverted to local control under a mission trust. At that time the surrounding land was leased out, its functions as a model farm no longer relevant, and the church and vicarage served mainly the local European population, 7 a pattern that was also seen at Aotea (see chapter 8).

Other features of this early agricultural settlement, established in part with the object of teaching English farming practice, can be detected in aerial photographs. These include the buildings used for a wheelwright's shop and other related farm industry. 8 Between Te Waimate and the settlement at Kerikeri, a road was constructed by Māori labour in 1835. The Māori settlement attached to Te Waimate has nothing to show in aerial photographs. However, workers' 'tenements' show faintly in early vertical aerial photographs. In February 1992 when I photographed the locality, the sole surviving mission house was partly obscured by trees, but the mill site was the clearest it had been for decades thanks to recent, careful clearance of trees by the landowner.

Fences

Fencing is a common aspect of intensive farming. Until the 1880s, when generally closer subdivision of landholdings was introduced, there was no compulsion on the owner of stock to fence them in. A landowner's main concern was to keep other people's stock out. 9 This reflects an attitude to frontier living that did not survive once the land had been more closely settled in the late nineteenth century. Fences, in a phrase of United States origin, had to be 'pig-tight, horse-high and bull-strong'. However, there was often a shortage of suitable wood or wire, so that what are now regarded as conventional fences were not possible. Barbed wire, the only effective form of wire for cattle and horses, was not available until the 1880s. In Central Otago, fences were sometimes made of schist slabs, but of wider interest in New Zealand archaeology are ditch and bank fences. They have an ancestry almost as old as European pastoralism and cropping, 10 4,000 years or more, and were used extensively in Māori settlements in the nineteenth century. 11 The fence was constructed by excavating a ditch and placing the fill to form a bank. Generally the bank was adjacent to areas from which stock, especially pigs, were page 251 to be excluded. The ditch and bank might enclose the yard of a house, a garden area, or the whole of a village or settlement. Where such fences do enclose gardens, the areas are quite large by contemporary standards, as much as one quarter of a hectare. This is about the minimum area needed to support a single family. 12 Sometimes evidence of settlement within the perimeter of a ditch and bank fence can be seen. Ditch and bank fences were also used to mark boundaries; examples have been constructed which are several kilometres in length. Unfortunately, they tend to be narrow and do not readily show on available aerial photographs. In my experience, these fences do not reflect modern surveyed boundary lines; they were constructed well before the widespread formalisation of titles in the 1870s.

There were occasions earlier in the nineteenth century, especially in mustering the stock, when the fencing of stock was a physical necessity. It is not uncommon to find ditch and bank fences employed near sheltered landing places, where stock would have been yarded before being driven on to scows or taken out to other coastal shipping. The sites of entire nineteenth-century Māori villages are sometimes marked by ditch and bank enclosures—not fortifications, as has sometimes been suggested, but fences. 13 The stock or pigs were kept out of the settlement, and the two purposes of the fence (keeping in or keeping out) can be readily confused. However, the distinction is now fairly well established in field studies. 14

The outstanding example of such fences that I have been able to find is at Nukutaurua, a locality on the north coast of Māhia Peninsula, mentioned in the earlier chapter on Hawke's Bay. The Māhia Peninsula has a distinctive high terrace landform, offering many opportunities for pre-European pā at its dissected edges. These are noted on the interpretative figure, 15 but are not our primary interest here which is fencing practice. There are several ditch and bank fence enclosures of points on the high terrace, and also on the low-lying coastal flats. The latter enclose areas that were perhaps at first papakainga and, later, stockyards. Within the enclosures on the coastal strip are several small rectangular banked areas (the sites of large whare and possibly an 1840s church) and kūmara storage pits on points on the adjacent stream. The date of the settlements is probably between 1830 and 1865. Some of the large ditch and bank enclosures have ploughed interiors but these enclosures are more likely to be stockyards. The concluding chapter of this book discusses this locality in more detail.

Ditch and bank fence marking a boundary in hill country near Matatā, Bay of Plenty

Ditch and bank fence marking a boundary in hill country near Matatā, Bay of Plenty

Potato clamps

A potato clamp was made by burying a crop of potatoes under a low flat-topped mound, thus sealing them off from the effects of light and frost. The earth came from a ditch, circular in plan, which was dug around the mound of potatoes. The ditch also served to keep the base of the clamp well drained. Such clamps leave a characteristic ring-shaped ditch up to 10 m in diameter, 16 and an example can be seen adjacent to Thacker's redoubt in the photograph in chapter 6. Māori use of the European white potato became common from the early nineteenth century. Māori practices in the storage of white potatoes page break
The beach front and edge of the high terrace at Nukutaurua, Māhia Peninsula

The beach front and edge of the high terrace at Nukutaurua, Māhia Peninsula

On the edge of the high terrace are three pā: Pari o Kena at left, Waipuna at centre, and Maungakahia, a pā defended by Kahungūnu, at right. On the high terrace at left and right of centre are ditch and bank enclosures. At far right on the coast is a landing place of Tākitimu, a whare wānanga site associated with that canoe, and a surviving pūriri tree planted at the time of landing.

The ditch and bank fences and nineteenth-century Maori settlement show clearly. The largest fence enclosure surrounds the site of a kāinga of the 1840s. The earth-walled outline of houses and raised-rim storage pits show within the enclosure. The second, smaller enclosure was probably a stockyard of later age.

page 254 were probably not dissimilar to European, although the crop may also have been stored in variants of the traditional pits.

Irrigation

In the arid regions of New Zealand, particularly Central Otago, the earliest irrigation was a by-product of the reticulation of water to the goldfields. As the gold-rushes petered out, there was a break-up of the large estates, as gold-miners and other immigrants sought land for settlement. A water supply that could provide for cropping and pastoralism was in place, but it was under-utilised or used wastefully. On alluvial flats and the high terraces, near the sites of the main gold-mining activity, the practice known as 'wild-flooding' was employed. The water flow was diverted by the placement of a simple canvas screen in the race. The water would both warm and irrigate the grass in dry frosty conditions, following the ancient principle of the English water-meadow, 17 probably well known to early pastoralists. Contemporary wild-flooding is shown in the vertical aerial photo page break
The high terrace and coastal flats at Nukutaurua, Māhia Peninsula

The high terrace and coastal flats at Nukutaurua, Māhia Peninsula

At centre is the pā, Waipuna, showing as a distinct rectangle of ditch and bank. On the high terrace to its left is a remnant of the double ditch and bank of another pā. Running along the foot of the slope (commencing bottom right) is a ditch and bank fence. The view is from the south-east, and was taken from above the pā, Maungakahia.

graph of Northburn, near Cromwell, an example which I detected while scanning photographs for gold-mining, the topic of the following chapter. Another early form of irrigation was the practice of flooding from more or less parallel series of ditches following the contour. Again some former head races for gold-mining allowed this to be done.

In other seasonally arid areas, such as South Canterbury, schemes specifically for irrigation were not introduced until the 1930s. Their need had been anticipated, but construction did not occur until subsidised labour became available during the depression. A practice known as 'border-diking', designed to achieve economic use of the water, came into use at this time. 18 This practice involved the systematic construction of ponding areas by the raising of banks on near-level ground, such as is depicted in the oblique photograph of Northburn in the following chapter.

1 Lee (1983: 64).

2 Sale (1981: 33).

3 Davidson (1982a: 15); Spencer (1983b: 77-110).

4 Standish (1962: 11).

5 Standish (1962); Thornton (1982: 26); Harris (1984).

6 Slocombe (1992).

7 Standish (1962: 26, 40).

8 New Zealand Historic Places Trust (1989). I am indebted to Aidan Challis (1992, pers. comm.), a former curator at Te Waimate, for discussions on the archaeological features.

9 Hargreaves (1965: 144).

10 Fowler (1983a: 108-111); Hargreaves (1965: 148-150).

11 See Smart (1966) for Whanganui River.

12 Such an area might grow three tonnes of potatoes in the season. A family of six consuming 5 kg per day would use 1.8 tonnes.

13 Smart (1966).

14 Trotter (1976).

15 Jeal and Jeal (1982: 5,11; Fig. 1).

16 My field observation. See also Bellwood (1969: 198-199); B.F. Leach (1979: 114).

17 Taylor (1987: 134-138).

18 Waugh (pers. comm., 1991).