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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 10, Issue 8 (November 1, 1935)

Pioneer Days

Pioneer Days.

As the year of New Zealand's Centenary as a British Colony approaches, interest in the records of the country's many-coloured story will increase. There are still with us many old people who can tell a tale of adventure in the breaking-in period and the days of the Maori War. The older generation of Maoris, too, in the Waikato, Taranaki and Bay of Plenty could, if they liked, add their stories to those already put on record. But all the old chiefs have gone; the men who were the leaders of their tribes in the numerous campaigns repose in the soil for which they fought. Fortunately their stories have not gone unrecorded; their side of the long struggle is in print.

But the pioneering period within the recollection of most of the old New Zealanders is narrowing in. We must now include many who came here after the close of the Maori Wars, and who still found a vast amount of adventure and hard-faring in the task of making homes for themselves in unbroken country. The end of the period of the pioneer settlers must be fixed approximately, I think, as corresponding to the end of the sailing-ship passenger period. After 1880 few British and other immigrants came to New Zealand in a “wind-ship.” The beautiful clippers and semi-clippers of the New Zealand Shipping Co. and the Shaw Savill and Albion Co., carried in their day many thousands of new settlers out to the new country. One of the last to bring passengers was the Lady Jocelyn, a splendid old three-skysail-yarder, troopship of the Crimean War and Maori War days, whose last important immigrant voyage was with the second party of North of Ireland settlers for Katikati in 1878. The Lady Jocelyn, wonder of the merchant navy, is still afloat on the Thames, her moorings down for good.

Those pioneers of Katikati, 1875–78, found no militia duty to complicate their efforts at home-making, but it was sufficiently rough and wild without that. They had no roads at first, the only access to their scrub and fern sections was by the harbour and creeks of Tauranga. They lived in raupo whares at first; it was a bewildering place to the farmers and men of various professions from well - settled secure Ulster. But they buckled in with success, a quicker success than that which came to the bush pioneers of North and South Auckland, where the great forests of tall timber had to be attacked. Katikati, which celebrated last month (September) the sixtieth anniversary of its founding, had a comparatively easy victory over untrimmed nature, albeit they had many reverses of prosperity. But the ups were more than the downs.