“The Father of Auckland.”

(Written for the “N.Z. Railways Magazine,” by James Cowan.)

“I sign this Deed of Gift on the 61st anniversary of the year I left the Maori village of Waiomu, on the shores of the Hauraki Gulf, and entered the primeval forest to carve with my axe the canoe in which I afterwards made my way to the island of Motu-korea, my first home in the Waitemata.”

With these simple yet eloquent words the venerable Dr. John Logan Campbell, Auckland's earliest settler, concluded the document which endowed his city with the noblest park and pleasure ground in New Zealand, the Maunga-kiekie estate, known as Cornwall Park, in honour of the Royal visit to the Dominion in 1901. He was knighted in the following year and died in 1912, at the age of ninety-four, and was buried on the summit of the hill park, the crowning beauty of the Greater Auckland plains.

Auckland” has been fortunate over all the other cities of the Dominion in the benevolent and generous character of its pioneer citizens, and the wonderful old man who came to be called “The Father of Auckland” was in some respects the finest of them all, and certainly the most munificent. He was not a politician, except for short periods in the early years of the province; his activities lay in the building up of the city and the development of its institutions and its prosperity. He saw the Waitemata before ever a house or even a tent stood on the site of Auckland. No other colonist was so closely associated with the foundation and the fostering of great business enterprises and the practical making of the country which he saw in its primitive condition and whose growth he watched over a period of nearly threequarters of a century.

“The Doctor,” as he was often called even after he became Sir John, was a true pioneer in the sense that he saw and felt much of the rough end of life and enjoyed it all, and in the midst of his prosperity and his manifold activities preserved the spirit of simplicity and the love of the out-of-doors, the bush and the old free days of Maoridom. He was to his last days a man of methodical habits and simple tastes. He cultivated the arts, he was a friend of many a great man in the literary world, he stood before princes, but he never lost his touch with the common things of life.

Physically the grand old man was an example to the younger generation, the leg-tired and the luxury-loving. Even when he was well on his eightieth year, and I think even later, he walked daily from his home at Kilbryde, in Parnell, to his office in the city, climbing that “stey brae” Constitution Hill on the way, a sufficiently stift test of soundness of wind and limb. He had a dark little office in Shortland Street, as close as might be to the spot where he pitched his tent amongst the manuka and ferns in 1840, and sank his water-barrel in the spring from which he filled his tea-billy though they didn't call it a billy in those days. There one used to see him, on occasion, in the Nineties, sitting there like some sagacious old sage, with his long white locks and beard, gathering in the threads of his many businesses, but ever ready to talk of the far romantic past, when time didn't matter on the shores of the Hauraki.