AUCKLAND—MARLBOROUGH

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 259, 1 November 1932, Page 6

AUCKLAND—MARLBOROUGH

SEVENTY-THREE YEARS OF HISTORY. (By A.J.S.) . Christened in Auckland in October, 1859, the Province of Marlborough and its two chief towns, Blenheim and Picton, celebrate their 73rd birthday' to-day. November 1 has been /the provincial holiday of the little South "Isknd province all these years, although the manner in which the province was created and the reason for the holiday are probably not very widely known.

To Auckland, which was then the capital of the Colony of New Zealand, came Mr. William Adams in the spring of 1859. His purpose was explained in- the- "New Zealander," one of the Auckland newspapers of the time, which told its readers: "Mr. Adams, of the Wairau, has been successful in his mission. The Wairau district has been separated from Nelson and erected into a new province, which is to be known by the name of Marlborough. The town of Waitohi, henceforth to be known as Picton, is to be the capital." So that was the first news the people of Auckland—and of New Zealand, too, for that matter —knew about the birth of the new Province of Marlborough, which was gazetted at Government House at Auckland on October 4, 1859, to take effect as from the following November 1.

Why did. Mr. Adams come to Auckland to obtain the birth certificate of a new province? The reason was that the majority of the electors of the Wairau district —there were only about 200 electors at that time—objected to being "tacked on" to Nelson Province. In those good old days, when there were only bridle tracks over the miles and miles of hilly and uninhabited country between the Wairau district and Nekon town, when there were only a few steamers plying round the New Zealand coast, the Wairau was as far away from Nelson as it now is from Auckland. So the settlers wanted their independence. There were other motives as well. For instance, a "radical" working man had just been elected Superintendent, or chief administrator, of Nekon Province, and the conservative runholders of the Wairau feared that they were in for a bad time under the new provincial administration. So they decided to "cut the painter." What's in a name? Had the Governor, Sir Thomas Gore Browne, and his Ministers and officials in Auckland selected any other name for the infant province things would have gone on just the same. The province would have prospered in the way it has done during the past 73 years, but present-day maps would have been worded differently. Officialdom of 1859 apparently thought that as those greatest captains of war, Wellington and Nelson, had been ctommemorated when the earlier provinces were named, it would be in keeping with the scheme of things to name the newest province after the jrre-at I>uke of Marlborough. As a sequel the little village that had grown up on the Wairau Plains was named after his "famous victory." Time it happened Blenheim got its name. Incidentally it must be one of the few New Zealand towns named after a battle, although round Napier we find several small towns that tell of Lord Napier's battles in India.

Picton did not become the capital of the newprovince, in spite of the announcement made in the old Auckland paper 73 years ago. Picton was named in honour of Sir Thomas Picton, one of the Duke of Wellington's corps commanders, who was mortally wounded at Waterloo. Consequently it Sα most appropriate that the ferry steamers crossing Cook Strait at its narrowest point ply from Wellington to Picton. For many years it was six of one and half a dozen of the other whether Picton or Blenheim was to be- the provincial capital. Residents of Blenheim stoutly supported their town, and pointed out that its central situation in the midst of the fertile Wairan Plain made it an ideal capital. The Picton faction proclaimed the advantages of a eeaport capital. And each pnrty was partly in the right, but the verdict of 73 years of history has been in favour of Blenheim.

"Marlborough the Golden," as some writers have described the province, is a land of golden sunshine that is reflected in wide expanses of golden grain, and of hillsides that change from the groen of spring into a golden shade under the influence of summer sunshine. Lofty mountains, snow-capped in winter, add a picturesqueness to the back country of Marlborough, but this provides an obstacle to closer settlement. Anyone who has looked south from Wellington in winter and seen the peaks of the snowclad Kaikouras rising- above the sea 50 to 100 miles away has seen a fine sight. As one poet has said: "The glory of old Marlborough is the beauty of her hills."

Seventy-three years ago the sparsely-peopled "Wairau district—a. land of unfenced sheep runs and no roads—took its proper place on the map as the brand-new Province of Marlborough. Progress has been steady but slow, and the total population to-day is no more than that of some Auckland suburban boroughs. There'has been* none of the meteoric growth that has been characteristic of the development of Auckland's dairying land during the last 25 years. Blenheim has grown from a collection of shanties with no official name into a well-built borough of 5000 people, and Picton, despairing of being the northern terminus of the much-debated South Island Main Trunk railway, lags behind with less than 2000 people.