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New Zealand's Burning — The Settlers' World in the Mid 1880s

12 — Country

page 159

12
Country

Before we discuss the open country settlers we must clarify some of our terms. The dominant figure of the 19th-century occupation of the open country was the ‘squatter’. This term reminds us of the Australian origins of the pastoral industry but as, unlike their Australian mentors, few of New Zealand's pastoralists helped themselves to unoccupied country by ‘squatting’ on it, we will prefer the term ‘runholder’. The runholders have had more than their fair share of attention both from contemporaries and from historians, so we will treat them more briefly than we have the less well recorded bush settlers. Stevan Eldred-Grigg's A Southern Gentry1 is a full and lively treatment of the rise of the runholders, their assumption of an elite role, and their enjoyment of an affluent lifestyle, in their main strongholds of the South Island. The term ‘gentry’ is apt, for these folk drew heavily on the traditions of the English rural gentry. But there are biases in Eldred-Grigg's treatment, particularly a monolithic emphasis on the runholders and an accompanying downgrading of those other significant occupiers of open country, the yeoman farmers. We need a term that distinguishes these yeomen from the bush yeomen of our last chapter. The term ‘open country yeomen’ is rather verbose, and the term ‘country yeomen’ can be confusing in that both bush and open country were ‘country’ as distinct from ‘town’. I will therefore adopt a term I have used elsewhere2 and call them ‘feldon yeomen’. We will examine the interaction of these feldon yeomen with the runholders, and of both with the bush settlements and the towns.

Runholders and feldon yeomen

The fires of the 1885–86 summer served to highlight the twofold nature of open country settlement as either runholders' country or yeomen's country. When fire got loose on the runholders' broad acres it had usually to be left to burn itself out, the available manpower being only sufficient to defend such key assets as homesteads and shearing sheds. The several fires which ‘swept off the grass' in the Wairarapa ‘in thorough Australian style’3 seem all to have burned until halted by natural obstacles or a change in the weather. Similarly there seems to have been no significant human intervention with the page 160 6,000-acre Dashwood fire in Marlborough, or with the two extensive fires in North Canterbury—the 5,000-acre one near Harwarden and the 50,000-acre one north of the Waipara River.4 In Hawke's Bay Alexander Grant would apparently have had little hope of containing the Burnside blaze but for the Rev Granger's inspired initiative in leading his congregation to the battle.5 But with the feldon yeomen it was different; any fire in their country seems to have met with a quick and sufficient response. We have seen how the yeoman country stretching from the western boundaries of Christchurch southwards to the mouth of the Rakaia came repeatedly under threat, mainly from fires originating in the runholders' country to their west. In each case the blaze was fought to a halt as it crossed the borders into yeoman country. Over these months many fires must have broken out in yeoman districts and been contained before reaching newsworthy proportions. For example, Nelson's Waimca Plains were severely affected by the drought and repeatedly blanketed by bush fire smoke. They must have had their own outbreaks, but none gained a sufficient hold to become newsworthy.

In fact none of the open country fires created dramas like those in the bush. Hence reports of feldon fires lack the detail and human interest of the bush fires. So to work out the main contrast between runholder and feldon yeoman country we will have to turn elsewhere than the fire reports. What can contemporary statistics tell us? Most of the relevant figures were collated only at provincial and county level, lumping stretches of runholder and feldon yeoman country in together, or including them with bush settlements. Fortunately, however, we have in Nelson's Waimea County a stretch of predominantly feldon yeoman country, deriving from the 50-acre suburban blocks of the Wakefield settlement scheme. And in Hawke's Bay County we have a stretch of predominantly runholder country, deriving from the squatter occupation of the 1850s. At the 1886 census their populations were similar in size, Hawke's Bay having 6,739, Waimea 8,404. The return of occupied holdings over one acre in extent shows Waimea with 1,291, Hawke's Bay with 573.

The sheepowner returns for 1885 show Hawke's Bay with 169 flocks to-
Table 12.1. Size of sheep flocks, 31 May 1885, Hawke's Bay and Waimea Counties
under50-100-500-1000-3000-5000-10000-30000
County509949999929994999999929999+
H.B.343220311725289
Waimea6410918530105
page 161 talling
1,221,406 sheep, giving an average flock of 7,227 sheep. Waimea had 403 flocks, totalling 101,106, giving an average of 251. Clearly sheep were widely dispersed across both counties, with the difference, as shown in Table 12.1, that Hawke's Bay's were in large flocks, Waimea's in small ones. Waimea's largest flock was 4,000; Hawke's Bay had 72 larger than this, the largest being Douglas McLean's 66,000. But even in Hawke's Bay one third of the flocks were under 1,000. What are we to make, then, of Eldred-Grigg's contention that ‘small farmers were unable to grow wool’ and that any comfort they enjoyed ‘was not usually based on participation in the export economy’? He places an economic flock in the 1860s at 3,000 sheep—‘anything less required too much capital outlay to be worthwhile’.6 On these terms half Hawke's Bay County's sheepowners of 1885, and the great majority of Waimea County's, were quite unaware of their own best interests. The truth of the matter is that the economic size for runholder flocks tells us nothing about the value and place of small flocks as an element in the economy of yeoman districts. And there can be no doubt that these yeomen were shearing their flocks and thereby contributing directly to the export economy.
Table 12.2. Aspects of 1885 farm production related to country population, Hawke's Bay and Waimea Counties
Per 100 of County Population
County Grain crops Acres Peas/Beans Acres Orchards Acres Pigs No. Turnips/Rape Acres
Hawke's Bay 33.9 0.22 2.37 46 49.55
Waimea 139.3 2.89 10.63 70 6.75

Table 12.2 further develops the strong contrast between the farming of these two counties. Clearly Waimea was heavily involved in grain, vegetable and fruit production. A comparison with national figures shows that much of Waimea's production must have been for markets outside the province. In contrast, the most extensive cropping in Hawke's Bay County was for winter stock feed. Hawke's Bay appears to have been meeting its own needs in fruit, but not in grain and vegetables. Hops provide an even more striking contrast. Waimea had 70 per cent of the colony's acreage, Hawke's Bay County had under 5 per cent, though this was enough to meet the provincial consumption. The figures for pigs are of interest principally in indicating the extent of dairying. Here again Hawke's Bay was barely meeting its own needs whereas Waimea was producing a surplus for outside markets.

page 162
Table 12.3. Size of inhabited dwellings, 1886 census, Hawkes's Bay and Waimea Counties
County No. of dwellings 1£2 rooms% 3£4 rooms% 5£6 rooms%
Hawke's Bay 1,97 18.46 40.60 37.59*
Waimea 1,422 7.74 20.11 71.87*

Table 12.3 gives an indication of the kind of homes the two county economies were supporting. Again we have a striking contrast. In Waimea County over 70 per cent were of five or more rooms whereas in Hawke's Bay County nearly 60 per cent were of four rooms or less. It is difficult to reconcile these figures with Eldred-Grigg's assertion that ‘small farmers were caught in a poverty cycle’ and that they were ‘burdened with debt, tottering on the edge of the cash economy’.7 Rather, if Waimea County is at all typical, the feldon yeomen were running profitable mixed economies, contributing something to the overseas export market and much to the colonial food market, while feeding themselves well and housing themselves almost sumptuously. Eldred-Grigg comments that ‘nobody knows much about … the independent farmers—the cockatoos'.8 We contend that the yeomen are too significant in our colonial story to be left in the mists of ignorance, and that we can indeed find out a good deal about them.

We reject Eldred-Grigg's account of the general position of the cockatoos of the 1870os and 1880s:

Economics of scale worked against them. If a small farmer raised wool, he could not manage to shear and sell it efficiently. If he grew crops, he was forced to push the land to the point of exhaustion. He could seldom afford fertiliser and he was unable to rotate. The results were low yields, depletion, then lower yields.9

We next sketch our own picture of where the feldon yeomen had arrived by 1885–86, then show that Waimea County's yeomen were indeed typical by examining two other feldon yeoman districts, and finally get down to flesh and blood with a contemporary description of a feldon yeoman career.

page 163

Feldon yeoman districts

Our contention is that every New Zealand urban centre of the 1880s was closely associated with a thriving yeoman district, which supplied it with fresh food—such as milk and butter, vegetables and fruit, eggs and poultry. This district also contributed to the urban horse transport needs, breeding at least some of the town's horses, and supplying much of the required hay and chaff. In addition these yeomen kept sheep, for both their wool and their mutton, and raised grain crops, as part of a well diversified farming economy. These farmers had achieved a highly successful adaptation to New Zealand conditions of the English tradition of high farming, in which improved pasture plants and new, more flexible, crop rotations enabled heavier stocking of the land, producing more manure to enrich the soil so that it could maintain new high levels of crop yields. Figure 12.1 gives some indication of the success the Waimea County yeomen were having in raising their output by these means.

The inclusion of pasture in the Waimea County rotations is reflected in the statistics—in some years large areas of land previously ploughed and sown down in pasture were reploughed to be put back into crops. Thus in 1883 the county had 19,197 acres ‘in sown grasses after having been ploughed’,

Suburban feldon yeoman country, Toitoi Valley, Nelson. ‘In this secluded and picturesque spot the inhabitants realise to some extent the poet's dream of arcadia.’ —Illustrated Australian News

page 164 in 1884 it had only 16,801 acres. The figure for 1887 was 23,694, but that for 1888 was only 15,410. Like their English mentors, these feldon yeomen may also have begun buying in manures to lift their production to even higher levels.10 Over these decades few communities in the world were as well fed, housed and horsed as New Zealand. The feldon yeomen prospered as a result of their major contribution to this achievement. While they did not emulate the ostentatious mansions of the runholders, their communities were on average far better housed than those of the squatter districts. Because their communities were closely associated with urban districts these yeomen were well in touch with the world and enjoyed a good range of social and cultural amenities. They were also in close touch with neighbouring runholder districts where both their produce and their skills were much in demand.

To complement our Waimea County example we will look at the feldon yeoman districts associated with Christchurch and Napier. Christchurch's district consisted of the eastern fringe of the plains, stretching north from the city to Rangiora, and south, first against the western edge of the Port Hills and then bordering Lake Ellesmere. This area does not appear as a unit in the official statistics. However, when a sample of the landholders with page 165 addresses in this area are abstracted from The Return of Freeholders 1882, they show a pattern strikingly similar to the Waimea one. There is a similar scatter of size of holding. In each case about half are listed simply as ‘farmer’ and about a fifth are designated as following another trade or calling, such as wheelwright, cattle-dealer, butcher, storekeeper, miller. When the sheep flocks of the sample are added in, the similarity continues. In each case about one third are running sheep, and the sizes of the flocks indicate that in most cases they must have been only one element of the farm's economy. The Canterbury volume of the Cyclopedia of New Zealand further confirms the similarity between this district and Waimea County.11 While the information was collected some 17 years later than our 1885 Waimea date, its biographies indicate that the rural economies and lifestyles of the two districts were very similar in the mid 1880s. A growing body of local and family history provides further confirmation of the similarities.12

Napier's feldon yeoman district consisted of the coastal strip stretching south from Petane/Bay View to Clive and then inland between the Ngaruroro and Tukituki Ravers to Pakapaki, just south of Hastings. Unlike the Waimea County and Christchurch yeoman districts, Napier's owed nothing to Wakefield settlement theories and the consequent 50-acre suburban block surveys, but had developed in direct response to local needs. The smallholdings surrounding Napier were liberally interspersed with large sheep runs, which is not surprising as the Napier urban market was only a small one. However, of Hawke's Bay County's 90 small sheep flocks of 1885 (those of under 3,000) 68 were in this small district. As with the Christchurch feldon yeomen, many of these flocks were clearly only a subsidiary aspect of the farming of the holding. The Return of Freeholders, sheepowners' statistics, and local and family histories, again support each other to indicate a rural community on the Waimea County plan. Had it been possible to subtract this district from the Hawke's Bay County for Figure 12.2, the contrast with Waimea County would have been striking indeed.

We now turn to our flesh and blood example. About 1877 Samuel Clayden, an ironmonger in the small Berkshire rural town of Faringdon, emigrated to Nelson with his wife and family of seven sons and three daughters. Doubtless concern for the futures of his large family was a major element in his decision. Samuel's brother Arthur Clayden, journalist and emigration agent, gives us two good descriptions of Samuel's progress as a yeoman farmer in the Eighty-eight Valley, near Wakefield, Nelson. Arthur first saw the farm in 1879, and revisited it in 1890, so his accounts neatly straddle our 1885 centre of interest. Writing for an English audience in his England of the Pacific, Arthur did not indicate that the subject was his own brother.

page 166

About two years ago a Berkshire tradesman of my acquaintance, feeling himself somewhat overborne with business and domestic cares, determined to dispose of his concern and go with his large family to New Zealand…. I found him just entered upon a thousand acre farm in the Nelson district, some twenty miles beyond the city, bushwards. The farm consisted of two-thirds of fern-clothed hill land, and one third of valley, thickly studded over with wild vegetation—manuka, flax, sweet-briar, &c. About a hundred acres only were in actual cultivation. Some two hundred and fifty sheep were feeding on the hills, and a score of young cattle grazed in the plains. The greater part of my friend's family remained at Nelson. One youth had found work in an engineering establishment…. Another was in a house of business at a good salary…. A third had developed an old love of carpentering….

Seated at my friend's hospitable table, I asked him how the change had on the whole turned out, was he satisfied with the general outlook? His answer was prompt, explicit, and decisively affirmative. He was supremely happy in his lot….

And as I accompanied him into his orchard and joined him in partaking of nature's bounteous feast in the shape of cherries, gooseberries, &c., and then mounting one of his horses, accompanied him over his extensive domain—now riding over a high hill, then passing through a kind of gorge where ferns of every kind flung their graceful leaves all around us … I began to understand his enthusiastic delight. Verily he had indeed made a good exchange!13

Arthur's second description of Samuel's farm was in a lecture given in London in August 1891.

A dozen years ago I traversed a wild region some five-and-twenty miles south of the city of Nelson, New Zealand. The wild gorse, the sweet briar, the dog bush, and the manuka scrub, had entire possession of the hills and vales. Never was more God-forsaken-looking district. A year ago I visited that spot again, and what a transformation scene appeared! It was as if the magic wand of a Drury Lane pantomime goddess had been waved over it. Splendid crops of wheat, barley and oats covered the flat land, and over the hills hundreds of sheep were disporting themselves. Instead of a wilderness I beheld a veritable garden of the Lord. A charming homestead occupied the central spot of a four or five hundred acre farm; and what was the secret of this strange metamorphosis? Yonder it stood before me in the shape of a sturdy settler and his half-dozen stalwart sons gathered under the broad verandah of the dwelling-house. On the central arch of the verandah was a Latin inscriprion, which being interpreted read thus:—‘BY MY OWN STRONG ARM, AND THE BLESSING OF PROVIDENCE.’14

page 167

Runholder districts

For the runholders we will concern ourselves mainly with changes occurring in the 1880s, and with correcting biases of earlier treatments. Some of the most important changes of the 1880s are well illustrated in a column ‘Notes by a Vagrant / A Tramp from Maraekakaho to Kaikora [i.e Otane]’ published in the Hawke's Bay Weekly Courier of 25 June 1886.

Leaving the Maraekakaho lodgintg houe you cross the creek of the same name, having on your left the Ngaruro and on your right the station at the foot of the limestone range, with the manager's house prettily situated on a knoll which gives a most commanding view of the surrounding country. You also pass the woolshed, one of the finest in the province, as it is fitted up with the latest improvements and conveniences for the working of the place. Then you travel on down a level plain, which takes one past the Maori pah, and on to a wider expanse of plain and which is spoken of as not very good land, but I have no hesitation in saying that it will be found a better grain-growing land than the rich plain nearer Hastings. After leaving the station about five miles you turn across the country, leaving the main road at what is called the Washpool creek, it having been used for that purpose in the early days and here one meets a pleasant sight in these ‘hard times’ and that is a fine double furrow plough at work turning over the hill sides. I hear that the contract is for a thousand acres, and with power to the contractors to greatly extend the quantity if they see their way to it. Here you cross a low spur of hills, taking one into the valley that forms the boundary between this and Mr Campbell's, and on the road to Raukawa. After getting on to this road and travelling about a mile one comes on four of the station teams at work showing the fatness of the land where formerly only a little native grass was to be found amongst the fern, and giving a very small carrying power in comparison with what it will be in the immediate future. Further up where the hills are steeper, they have disc-harrowed and surface sown which is doing well. On the opposite side of the valley some contract ploughmen are turning over a large area, and further up the station some teams have put down a large field in rape and turnips…. Lower down this valley, there are hills which have been laid down with the plough in previous years, and the quantity of sheep and cattle carried in high class condition is strong evidence of what is to be gained by the use of the plough.

The major activity which our ‘Tramp’ found to report on was what J.D. Gould has called ‘the formation of sown pasture … the one great contribution to improved productivity in New Zealand pastoral farming before World War I’.15 Right across the New Zealand feldon this process was in full swing in the mid 1880s. The 1881 census showed 3.6 million acres of sown pastures page 168 but by 1891 this had risen to 9 million acres. J.D. Gould summarises what happened thus:

In the last three decades of the nineteenth century lowland tussock was brought under the plough and the land laid down in English grasses. Sowing rarely followed ploughing immediately, for cultivating the land for a few years improved the chances of preventing the recolonisation of pastures by native vegetation and forming a good weed-free sward. Further, the building of railways and the possibility of exporting wheat and other grains to European markets in the 1870s and 1880s made cultivating the ploughed-up tussock financially attractive by laying land to a crop of wheat or oats for a few successive years. The soil was rich in nitrogen from the droppings of stock which had been pastured on the unploughed tussock for several decades, and for a few years excellent yields could be obtained. Specialist firms contracted to plough the tussock, sow and harvest a grain crop for a specified number of years, and then leave the land in English grasses…. Indeed, the South Island ‘wheat bonanza’ of the 1870s and 1880s represented largely an intermediate phase in the transition from native tussock to sown English pasture, and was carried out, not on an unchanging area, but successionally on land in process of conversion from time to time.16

Our ‘Vagrant's' report shows that even on the Hawke's Bay northern fringe of runholder New Zealand this process was in full swing in 1886. Some stations were using their own plough teams, but the contractor had also appeared. The cropping here seems to have been mainly for winter feed though ‘Vagrant’ suggests that there was a likelihood of the flat land near Maraekakaho being sown in grain. On the steep hill slopes further back, where the plough teams could not go, the land was being broken up by disc harrows and surface-sown.

This pasture improvement right across the broad acres of runholder New Zealand involved a massive capital investment. Underlying the change was the fact that the carrying capacity of the native vegetation was steadily declining. If they did nothing the runholders could expect an inexorable decline in their flocks. J.D. Gould's investigations suggest that the sowing of English grasses increased the carrying capacity by a factor of something between four and nine times.17 This change did not come cheap, for besides the expense of ploughing and sowing, new fences were needed in most cases to protect the crop from stock. B.R. Patterson has found that surviving station records for the southern North Island indicate an expenditure of up to £5 per acre.18 The improved pastures and associated internal fencing of the runs encouraged runholders to undertake breed improvement, which was a further expense. Others had first to freehold their land before there was any point in undertaking these improvements. For many this meant page 169 divesting themselves of part of their holding to obtain the capital to improve the rest.

The absence of primogeniture was another continuing influence in encouraging smaller holdings. So, well before the Liberal land policies of the 1890s aimed at ‘bursting up’ the big estates, and the full impact of refrigeration working in the same direction, runs tended to become smaller, and because their husbandry became more diverse, to become more like farms than runs. Table 12.4 illustrates this from the landholding returns of the 1881 and 1886 censuses, showing that in the largely pastoral, squatter dominated province of Canterbury the number of large runs was practically static, whereas the number of smaller runs and large farms was growing. As the Canterbury provincial figures will reflect landholding changes in both runholder and feldon yeoman districts, we have given the Ashley County figures separately. Here, where there was very little feldon yeoman settlement, the number of larger runs has increased by 3, but the smaller runs have increased by 21.

Table 12.5 shows that these landholding changes were reflected in the census ‘Occupations’ returns. Clearly significantly more landholders were seeing themselves as yeoman farmers, and fewer were seeing themselves as runholders.

Table 12.4. Size of holdings, Canterbury Province and Ashley County, 1881 1886
Canterbury Province Ashley County
Size of Holdings (Acres) No. 1881 No. 1886 Increase % 1881–6 No. 1881 No. 1886 Increase % 1881–6
1–50 3346 4183 25.0 736 761 3.4
51–100 1056 1064 0.8 287 259 -9.8
101–1000 2357 2467 3.4 467 508 8.8
1001–5000 272 359 32.0 52 73 40.4
5001+ 90 91 1.1 13 16 23.1
Table 12.5. Canterbury farmers and runholders, 1881 & 1886
1881 1886 Change % 1881–6
Farmer, market gardener 4459 4839 +7.8
Runholder, grazier, sheep or cattle farmer 169 155 -8.3
page 170

Town, country and bush

We next turn our attention to the interrelationships between runholders, feldon yeomen, bush settlers, and townsmen. First let us ask how these changes in runholder New Zealand would have affected their settler neighbours. The widespread ploughing up of the runs would have created a demand for ploughmen, draught horses and oats. We have no figures for draught horses, but the 47 ploughmen of the 1881 census had increased to 340 in 1886, and the area sown in oats roughly doubled between the late 1870s and the mid 1880s. This demand for labour, horses and fodder would have been a great boost to the feldon yeoman districts. Some bush settlements would also have contributed, but their main input would have come from their forest harvest. A large proportion of the more than 5,000 tons of fencing wire imported in 1885 must have been for the runholder districts. According to Brett's Colonists' Guide (p. 77), a sheep-proof fence required seven wires, and ‘five wires at the bottom of No. 8, and two wires at the top of No. 6, will require 1 ton 7 cwt. per mile’. Had all the fences been constructed to this specification, the 1885 wire imports would have provided 3,765 miles of fence. In constructing wire fences Brett's advised

Sometimes the posts are placed one chain apart, that is, 80 to a mile; but to make a good fence at feast 320 must be used. This will place them 16 ½ feet apart, and then they require an equal number of battens or stakes placed alternately, which will thus leave a space of 8 ¼ feet between the uprights. Straining posts, every 10 chains, should be at least 9 feet long.19

On these terms, the fencing in 1885 would have required about 1.2 million posts (including about 30,000 9-foot strainers) and an equal number of battens. This explains the losses of piles of posts throughout the bush settlements in the 1885–86 fires. Posts and timbers will also have been needed for stockyards and shearing sheds to handle the growing flocks. The transformation of runholder New Zealand was indeed good news to bush settler New Zealand.

The almost 30 per cent growth in the sheep flocks, from a little under 13 million at the 1881 census to over 16.5 million in 1886, will have meant an enhanced demand for shearers, who will have been largely feldon and bush yeomen. With the growth of the sheep population outpacing that of the settlers, shearers over these years were ‘masters of the situation’ and runholders had ‘to wait their convenience’.20 The New Zealand Mail of 18 September 1880 describes the New Zealand shearer thus:

In ‘sheep districts’ the regular shearer almost forms a distinct branch in the social scale. He scorns the idea of being a laborer, and takes a position above page 171 shepherds and station hands, who in a manner bow to him…. The majority in this colony are men who own small farms. They leave them in charge of their wives and children from October to, perhaps, the middle of January, and during that time earn more money than the common station hand does during the whole year.

In the southern North Island the rising bush settlements were becoming an increasingly important source of shearers. Thus in the spring of 1892 the Dannevirke Bush Advocate reported that

The shearing season has at length commenced, and bush-fellers and others are furbishing up their saddles and sharpening up their shears preparing for the fray. Horses with or without legs are in demand, and anything that will carry a man and his swag can realise a fair price.21

Our last chapter dealt with much of the interrelationship between the bush settlers and other areas, and the runholders' place in the colonial world is already well covered in the literature. We will therefore now concentrate our attention on how the feldon yeomen related to other types of settlement, using first Waimea County and then Christchurch's Rangiora-Ellesmere fringe as our examples.

A striking feature of the Waimea County feldon yeomen was that they had a large input into servicing more distant runholders and urban dwellers, as well as their immediate neighbours. As shearers they crossed the hills and mountains to serve the Marlborough and Canterbury runholders22, and the sea to shear in the Rangitikei-Manawatu district.23 As farmers they produced various commodities in quantities much beyond the needs of their local Nelson City urban market. The evidence shows that a large part of this extra output was crossing Cook Strait to meet a shortfall in Hutt County's supply of the Wellington market. Figure 12.2 illustrates this. The New Zealand figures are included to indicate the average level of consumption in the colony. Waimea County production is related to its own population plus that of Nelson City, Hutt County production to its own population plus that of Wellington City. It will be seen that for each commodity the Waimea farmers are producing beyond the needs of their local market, and that conversely the Hutt County farmers are falling short, with their output of barley and fruit scarcely registering on our graph. A busy shuttle of coastal shipping linked the Waimea harvests with the Wellington needs.

Figure 12.3 indicates that besides the outflow of labour and produce from Waimea County it was also contributing finance to other New Zealand districts. The figure is based on the work of Margaret Galt (née Arnold) on late 19th-century New Zealand rural mortgages. Her study included an examination of the majority of the mortgages taken out on land over one acre in page 172
Figure 12.2. New Zealand, Waimea County and Hutt County, production of various commodities per 100 population, 1885

Figure 12.2. New Zealand, Waimea County and Hutt County, production of various commodities per 100 population, 1885

the year to 31 March 1886 (a total of 2,582).24

Figure 12.3 of course deals with the overall provincial picture, and will include urban and runholder as well as feldon yeomen lenders. But the yeoman country of Waimea County represented a significant proportion of the province's wealth.

This outflow of finance from Nelson reflects the fact that its rural economy was well established by 1886, and that its own unpromising interior had by then little scope for further settlement. It is not surprising that when settlement of the lower North Island's Great Bush got under way in the 1870s there was strong migration from yeoman Nelson to this new frontier of opportunity.25 The flow seems to have strengthened in the 1880s, and by 1891 Nelsonians were so concerned at the exodus of their young people to the North Island that a public meeting on the matter was called in Nelson.26

A similar concern was being expressed in 1891 by the Lyttelton Times:

The best young blood goes from Canterbury and Otago to the North. About Woodville, Pahiatua, Hawera, Inglewood and Stratford you may find the young men hewing down forests and practising the hardy virtues they have page 173

Figure 12.3. Net flow of mortgage finance, Nelson and Taranaki Provinces, year ending 31 March 1886 (Source: Adapted from M.N Arnold, The Market for Finance in Late Nineteenth Century New Zealand, Map 4.2, p. 116)

learned from their sires, the pilgrims of the Akaroa Peninsula and the Canterbury plain.27

A strong flow from Canterbury to the North Island bush seems to have been under way since the early 1880s.28 Our study of the Stratford bush fire sufferers suggests a significant input from Banks Peninsula's older bush settlements. There is evidence that the Rangiora-Ellesmere feldon yeoman district was also an important contributor. As with Banks Peninsula, by the 1880s this district was producing a new generation of skilled yeomen for whom there were few prospects in Canterbury. The story of the settlement page 174 of the bush-clad Waimamaku Valley on Northland's Hokianga Harbour by the Christchurch Village Settlement Association is a good example of a North Island bush district providing a settlement frontier for would-be yeomen inspired by the Rangiora-Ellesmere achievement. In April 1886 two Christchurch working men decided to follow up a newspaper description of the Hokianga's virgin land and explore the possibility of a settlement association under one of Lands Minister John Ballance's schemes. They were 37-year-old James Morrell, jobbing gardener of Spreydon, married with eight children, and 30-year-old Robert Page, carpenter and joiner, married with four children.29 The Return of Freeholders 1882 shows both with land outside Christchurch in Selwyn County. Page's £180 worth was probably a farmlet around his home at Hillmorton, and Morrell must have been going out to his £50 holding from his Spreydon home. Over the next few months these two interested a number of their friends in the scheme, enlisted the help of A.P. O'Callaghan, member for Lincoln, in approaching the government, and Morrell travelled to the Hokianga to spy out the land. In due course an Association was founded, the land acquired, and over the winter of 1887 the settlement of the bush-clad Waimamaku Valley begun. The majority of the settlers were Christchurch working men, but the Return of Freeholders shows that at least three others besides Morrell and Page had earlier taken up freehold land in Selwyn County.30 Others may have begun participating among the Rangiora-Ellesmere feldon yeomen without having acquired freehold land. The holding of early meetings of the association in Robert Page's rural home suggests that the core members were working men from the city's southern suburbs who were already involved on neighbouring rural land. The Waimamaku settlement was thus well served by a combination of rural experience with craft skills such as those of wheelwright, bootmaker and carpenter.31 A combing of bush settlement local histories, settler biographies and family histories should provide many further examples of the contribution of the Rangiora-Ellesmere feldon yeoman district to the North Island bush frontier. We need studies in depth of this and other feldon yeoman districts to establish whether the agricultural mastery evidenced in our Waimea County 1880s statistics was common to feldon yeoman New Zealand, and to assess its contribution to the ensuing triumph of yeoman farming over so much of bush and runholder New Zealand.

The interrelationships between these feldon yeomen and their more immediate neighbours, the plains runholders and the Christchurch townsmen, are well illustrated by the careers of Kenneth McIntosh (1833–1906) and his wife Grace (1837–1932).32 This newly married Scottish couple arrived in Canterbury in 1859, and moved from labouring life to substantial yeoman prosperity at the northern end of the Rangiora-Ellesmere strip. It was shearing and dairying that put them on their feet. In their early years Kenneth worked page 175 at Tuahiwi pitsawing timber for the Christchurch market, and travelled out each summer to the shearing on the stations. Grace looked after her growing family in the home they had built with their own hands at Kaiapoi on a piece of rented land where they ran a little herd of cows. Using dairymaid skills learnt in Scotland she produced butter for the local and Christchurch markets. With their savings they purchased land, and increasingly their time went into farming on their own account, with Grace's dairying branching out into cheese making. By 1880 Grace was managing their own purpose- buik cheese and butter dairy, and Kenneth had laid the foundations of a Clydesdale stud, going on to become a prominent exhibitor, prize-winner and eventually judge of Clydesdales. Kenneth followed a mixed farming regime, with sheep and pigs as well as the cows and Clydesdales, and with various crops, including grain and potatoes. These careers fit in well with the needs of the neighbouring runholders and townsmen. Kenneth's shearing met a major runholder need of the 1860s; his Clydesdales met the new need of the bonanza wheat years of the 1880s. Town needs were met by his pitsawing of the 1860s, his mixed farming of later years, and by Grace's long involvement in dairying.

Our final glance at this district is of the development at its southern end of a self-conscious yeoman spirit—an expression of the district's distinctiveness as over against the neighbouring runholders and townsmen. ‘To the Rev Mr Bluett belongs the honour of first organizing the farming community of Ellesmere’ write the historians of Ellesmere County.33 The Rev W.J.G. Bluett, MA(Oxon), Vicar of Ellesmere 1865–72, was a farming parson who seemed to embody the spirit of his community:

… being a jolly fellow [he] was known throughout his countryside and far beyond it, as Friar Tuck…. it was a common thing for him to drive to church on top of a cart-load of sheep-skins, and after conducting the service in a most impressive manner, administering the sacrament, baptising the babies and doing all that was necessary within his sacred edifice, to hold a sort of market outside, dispose of his skins, make a deal for a colt or a calf, hire a ploughman or some reapers, and in short do all the agricultural business for the week. The simple country folk saw no harm in this, but on the contrary became strongly attached to their farmer-priest …34

Bluett took several initiatives to draw the local yeomen together to further their interests. He helped found the Ellesmere Agricultural and Pastoral Association, which from the mid 1870s ran the first A & P show in Canterbury each season. Ellesmere yeomen cannot have felt that their needs were quite met by the great Canteroury A & P Association even though its sumptuous Addington showgrounds were almost on their doorstep. They were not quite at home with this squatter dominated affair. Their farming page 176 parson was very acceptable to them, whereas he would doubtless have irritated a runholder or city congregation. Indeed he irritated the bishop, who ‘recommended the Rev Mr Bluett to resign his cure and stick to his sheepskins, which he cheerfully did.’35

* The percentages do not add up to 100 because the sizes of 57 H.B. and 33 Waimea houses were not stated