Kinloch
(Runs 5 and 110, afterwards re-numbered 549)

As finally constituted, Kinloch ran from the east side of Lake Forsyth to Peraki and Saddle Hill, and back to the Okuku river. For a short time Reid's Hill was worked with it as an outlying block.

Smith and Robinson started this station about the middle of 1850, but whether on a Maori lease or simply on a small freehold section I do not know. The Provincial Government issued their first licenses for it, Run 5 of seven thousand three hundred acres, and page 342Run 110, five thousand acres, in January, 1852.

Henry Smith arrived at Akaroa in the Monarch in April, 1850, and I know nothing more about him except that he was the partner who lived on the station. Charles Barrington Robinson, the first magistrate at Akaroa, had come there in 1840, at the time when Captain Stanley hoisted the British flag and forestalled the French. Robinson bought a good deal of land in Akaroa and Pigeon Bay from 1840 onwards. There are accounts of him in Hay's Earliest Canterbury and the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, so I need say no more about him, except that he sold all his New Zealand property in 1865 and returned to England, where he died in 1899, aged 87.

Smith and Robinson were the first to import purebred shorthorns from England to Canterbury, but did not keep the station long. They sold it early in 1852 to Hugh Buchanan. A few horses and cattle were the only stock on it.

Buchanan named the station Kinloch after Kinloch Mhor, his birthplace in Argyleshire. It is a very suitable name, as, I understand, Kinloch means 'head of the lake 'in Gaelic. Smith's homestead was near the Okuti school (where Anson Hutchison lived afterwards); but Buchanan, who had stocked the run with merino sheep, found it very difficult to get his wool away from there, so in 1852 bought the land at Joseph Price's whaling station at Ikoraki and moved there. In 1864, when the roads had been improved, he moved again to the present site.

Buchanan had been a sheepfarmer in a large way in Scotland before he came (by way of Australia) to New Zealand. Before buying Kinloch he spent some time with Caverhill at Motunau to see something of the country. He was one of the ablest of the squatters of his day, as was afterwards his son Hugh. Before he died, he had made thirteen thousand acres of the best of the run freehold and erected about 65 miles of wire fencing. He was a member of the old Provincial Council from 1866 till 1870. He died in 1877, aged page 34365. Soon after his death his executors bought Oashore, Rhodes's old run east of Lake Forsyth. On this run, which includes the sites of two old whaling stations, the freehold ran down to low-water mark, which is very unusual in Canterbury.

Buchanan's sons, Hugh D. and John F., went on with Kinloch until 1906, when they sold nearly thirteen thousand acres to the Government for closer settlement. The price was something over £120,000. H. D. Buchanan rented back from the Government his own house and about a thousand acres, while John Buchanan reserved the homestead and several thousand acres of freehold. During his time Kinloch was famous as the home of one of the most valuable thoroughbred studs in New Zealand. Martian was perhaps the best sire he had. He died in England in 1927 but the station still belongs to his executors.

After he left Kinloch, H. D. Buchanan took a large Maori leasehold near Gisborne. His sons have a property at Taihape.