WHY THEY CAME.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 260, 2 November 1932, Page 6

WHY THEY CAME.

Some members of Parliament have drawn touching pictures, interspersed with bits from Burns, of th*e distressful conditions in the Old Land which compelled emigration to New Zealand. The tendency to exaggeration was obvious. We know that the Scottish Highland evictions, the Irish potato famine, the labour conditions in England, directed the thoughts of many to the new lands round the world, but it is quite misleading and historically incorrect to say or infer that New Zealand was peopled mostly by people who were starving in the mother countries. The proportion of our early immigrants born in the slums of the Old Country cities must have been very small indeed. Really there was a process of natural selection which sent the best class of Englishman and Scot and Irishman overseas, at any rate the class best fitted to break in a raw, new country and make it a home of civilisation and comfort. Many were men and women of education and culture who gave a lead in the shaping of colonial life. The majority of those who settled on the land in the first four decades of New Zealand's existence as a British country were, it may broadly be said, of the class described in England as yeoman farmers. Let me cite a specific case, as rather typical of the class of people whose pleasure as well as business it was to live on the land and whose supreme satisfaction was making the waste country productive. The father of this New Zealand family in mind came from the North of Ireland in 1863, the mother from the Isle of Man in 1859. They both came of families who had been farmers, working their own land, for many generations. The father, who lost both his parents when he was a boy, was fairly comfortably off as a young farmer. One day he saw in a Belfast book shop Dr. Thomson's "Story of New Zealand," and he bought the work. The description of the new land, its climate and soil, its space and attractiveness generally, so influenced him that he decided to a try his fortunes over the seas while he was still young and vigorous. He made arrangements to dispose of his farm, and in a few months he was on his way to Now Zealand in a London clipper.

The mother of this colonial family was one of a Manx family of eleven. Her people owned two small farms and they were prosperous enough in their way, they lacked for nothing. But the young family were growing up and the home glens were becoming too small. So the parents, when they heard of a new land of greater opportunties, decided to uproot themselves from the old places and give the young ones a more generous chance than they would have in the island. They heard of New Zealand's forty-acre scheme of that day, under which 6ettlers who paid their own passages out to the colony were granted forty acres of land free for each adult. So, by the beginning of the 'sixties, they were in a new home, a farm of some 120 acres in East Tamaki, and from there most of' the sons and daughters in due course found homes of their own.

The point which this family footnote to pioneering history is intended to illustrate is that in neither case was immigration to New Zealand forced by poverty or oppression or the alleged tyranny of landlordism. It is quite possible that the founders of the family would have done better financially had they remained in the home lands. But they had the wide outlook and the spirit of enterprise, and, I suppose, a hereditary love of adventure and the taking of risks. No doubt it was more difficult for such people to tear themselves away from the old places and old friends than it was for those whose emigration was dictated by sheer poverty. There was sterling stuff in many of those who were driven away by the bad old conditions in their birthlands, and this element made good here. But the families who deliberately left comfort and peace and settled life to break new ground in a little known and perilous land were the first /ank of pioneers, .. ; r-TANGIWAI.