REARING THE NEW LAND

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27404, 17 July 1954, Page 9

REARING THE NEW LAND

ttCKjNZIE COUNTRY

Fire Both Great Help And Grim Hazard LONELINESS and privations OF FIRST SETTLERS

(Specially Written for “The Press”)

LBy

W. VANCE]

Th* °{.i the Mac kenzie Country could not be fared bj the few settlers, so the solution was fire One of e first things a settler did was to fire his country- fire at too often spread to a neighbouring run. Walter Bain, wager for the Jolhe outstation belonging to Balmoral, said (t . in the sixties, a tussock fire started on Balmoral was by a nor -west wind until it blazed fiercely along a Umlc front with half the population of the Mackenzie jantry trying to ha t it They could not stop it from sweep- , on to Ihe Molds station, but they saved the stock by iving them into swamps. 3

I w summers increased the fire risk. i Utr.ce Kennaway in “Crusts” tells ii r during the summer of 1860, they ■e, f the air for days “thicken with/ a of distant fires, and we waited ti tiously, hardly hoping ourselves to Ji ape. One morning, on coming outsu f the hut, a thick waving wall of he fa which darkened the sunrise in U i valley, rose above the ridges on s i eastward side of the Burke’s Pass.” jv noon the fire had crept over the 'iocs of Burke’s Pass and by sunthe whole line of hills was ablaze. , save their stock, the Kennaway rXthers, with the help of their .fitter, Frederick Delamain, John Hay " ftkapo station, two shepherds, and G hillock driver, decided to make a , e-break between their run and the a poaching fire. Kennaway describes i < they started from the Opihi river Burke’s Pass, and making for an4 jgr branch of the Opihi river they egan to draw, piece by piece, a line frethrought the thick dry growth, ating it out with green palm-tree (cabbage trees), as soon as it d burnt for iteelf a width of 20 or feet By this means we hoped to ■etch a belt of burnt ground from to water, so as to be able, at is point, to check and beat back the g of fire coming so inevitably down 0 the run. The danger of the onpt lay in the risk of our own e getting beyond our control among e jungle, and spreading, in spite of 'over the run we were trying to

While one man lit the fire, the hers, as soon as the allotted distance. 20 feet was reached, beat out the lines with cabbage-tree heads. In st and smoke the party worked njughout the night, John Hay, workj “like Vulcan and Hercules both it together, in the front.” By daylight er were afraid that they might not icteed in reaching the river before e fire, which was raging towards an on a four-mile front. “Frantic Efforts” is Kennaway continues, “the riverwere striving for was not farl L but at length, in spite of frantic ierts. the flames raced across the unished track, and, for 200 yards, got sy hold of the plain beyond. But few this point the river bent toinis us with a sudden turn, and a asce was still left of beating the back to the bank. The Scotsman Ming, we followed on, each after th. striking at the hot blaze three four strokes, then falling back for sther man instantly to take his re, and so on. After 20 minutes Ek. the hungry fire was driven back [the goal was gained—the brink of e safeguard river—where stonesken ripples of running water iped out the last of the conquered pes.” m Firing the country and draining a eteds destroyed food and shelter for 1 & numbers of native birds, some of aich are now almost extinct in the rkenzie Country. This in turn seted the seasonal migrations of mika and Waimate Maoris, whose tem had been to camp round the ores of Lake Tekapo and Lake a ‘nkairi. From there they travelled up iver beds and valleys, returning with n real quantities of birds, which they i reserved and exchanged for mutton e» irds caught by Otago Maoris. During £ 1869-70 season a party of Waimate aoris preserved three tons of birds toght in the Mackenzie Country. The aoris were received with friendliness I the settlers; but, as flocks increased, e hordes of sheep-worrying dogs uich formed part of the Maoris’ reme were not so welcome, yet the iwris continued these seasonal igrations into the Mackenzie Country Cl about 1889. Temporary Shelters The aoris built temporary shelters t£ax sticks and snowgrass along the ake shores, and the first home of the aseha—a tent —was almost as sporary. Soon, however, the tehas learned that, in this land of Eh winds and fierce storms, solid, *-built homes were essential. The nt settlers, John McHutcheson and

fcrty, telling of their arrival into the •ackenzie Country, say they spent one W ih the Mackenzie Pass, then the Tekapo river late the *** evening. McHutcheson states: ‘We Phthed our pioneer tents on the shores J* Lake Pukaki and proceeded to unour banners to the evening breeze. banners were two pairs of pants, Mentally soaked in crossing the *s®Po river, and they streamed out gyy from the ridge pole of a tent, at z® fioor of which the owners thereof sackcloth and ashes —that is to .their legs toasted at the ashes or I* pmp fire.” i *2 absence of trees, the first ““besteads were made of ebb, with Z? thatched with snowgrass and with windows. Later homesteads had r £ ne walls mortared with clay. The tc, Haldon homestead, built by and Thomas TeschemakST *the sixties, is made of local stone, and mortared together in elay and chopped snowgrass. Tire are about 18 inches thick, and rooms are placed end to end. kJ 1 no connecting passage way. This Z? oric homestead, with quaint gabled X** ss - is the last of the Mackenzi 0 pioneer homesteads. It standsfco u of magnificent trees, but now roofless, is rapidly n - battered to ruin by storms. Th? Nor’-Wester nor’-wester, strong, gusty, and brings heavy rain to the * becomes a dry, hot and Ithe ? wind b s’ the time n reaches many respects it refits the wind of Switzerland. nc tive cloud formation, the ar a lto-cumulus “hogback.” has I the warning signal to

™^ ai ? eers as as musterers, nor -west arch” is one of the features of Canterbury. en?^ msay Wilson, of Timaru, who has y ea rs in studying the weather m South Canterbury, said: A full explanation of the Canterbury nor -wester is rather complex, but the following simplified account covers most of the important features. A warm moist air-mass crosses the Tasman Sea and is forced over the Main Divide. Being subject to less pressure, the rising air expands and decreases in temperature at the rate of about 54 Fahrenheit per 1000 feet until condensation occurs when clouds form and rain falls. The rising air still continues to drop in temperature but at a considerably reduced rate (about 3 Fahrenheit per 1000 feet) owing to the release of latent heat. This reduced rate is the key to the problem of why air should become so much warmer merely by ascending and descending the same height. Before coming down on the Canterbury side of the Main Divide, the air ha« lost most of its moisture in the form of rain or snow and so gains in temperature at the rate of 5J Fahrenheit per 1000 feet during the whole descent. TTie actual rise in temperature varies according to the temperatures and humidities of different air masses, but it is usually in double figures on the Fahrenheit scale and enough to change the warm moist air to a hot dry wind.”

Pioneers’ Homesteads

A few howling nor’-westers were enough to convince the new settler that his homestead must have some shelter from this wind. As there were no trees, he usually built on the south side of a hill or mountain, where the full force of the wind was broken. As he needed an assured and constant water supply, the homestead had to be near a creek, where it was usual to find the best soil for growing vegetables and shelter trees. Matagouri scrub—handy for fuel—also grew better along creek beds. Electricity, motor transport, shelter belts of trees, facilities for pumping water and other factors have now eliminated the need for selecting sites sheltered from the north, but wellestablished homesteads, with their outbuildings and shelter trees, are not easily transplanted. For this reason, many homesteads still remain on the original sites, where they see hardly any sun in winter and where, for weeks at a time, ice and snow lie around the house.

In those pioneer homes the icy atmosphere outside contrasted sharply with the cosiness of the interior, insulated against cold by 18 inch cob walls and warmed by blazing totara logs dragged from the hillsides. Cooking was done on the open fire, the first stoves being a kind of home-made drum that sat on top of the fire. Then came the camp oven, a round iron pot, about 14 inches in diameter and five inches high, with an iron lid. This pot was also put on the fire, with hot embers heaped on the lid to accelerate cooking. The advent of the colonial oven, a rectangular iron box about two feet long and one feet high, with a reinforced iron door, marked a big improvement. The oven, which was large enough to cook a family dinner, was fitted into the middle of the open fireplace. There was a grating on top of the oven upon which the open fire was built, and glowing embers were shovelled into a space- under the oven. Evenings Spent in Kitchen For warmth and for convenience, the runholder, his wife, family, and station hands all dined and spent their evenings in the kitchen. The owner did his share of the daily work alongside his men, and was indistinguishable from them, for they dressed alike —usually a red or blue woollen open-neck shirt, “cabbage-tree” hat, and moleskin trousers. „ . t „ This kind of social life alleviated the loneliness about which pioneer reminiscences speak more often than of their endurance of hardships and severe winters. In his reminiscences, John McHutcheson, tells how he and

his wife “were left alone for a time, monarch of all we surveyed iricluding Mount Cook, Ben Ohau, and the Leioig ranges. Our isolation Situated in the midst of wildness and desolation, our surroundings grand in the extreme but somewhat overpowering in their silent lonesome nes s— 4o or 50 miles from any human ha Loneliness seems to have b of the main reasons why the Engnsn pioneers, wishing to liv ® genial surroundings, sold their runs Scotsmen. T. D. Burnett, of Mount Cook station, said: “From 1865 to 1895, probably three-fifths of the Mackenzie nonulation could claim Gaelic as mother-tongue; whole mustering gangs were Highland born; most of the permanent shepherds were the same. Ev?n toward the end of this period when the colonial-born began to make JheTr presence felt, the sheep-following class of the latter were mostly of Highland descent.” A Lonely Homestead The manner in which Highlanders learned to cope with loneliness is illustrated by this pen Portrait in I aurence Kennaway s Crusts. He de =« g e a n r ‘ de "| & "hippie' duie«y , agamst sea-snoie, wv throw from the water’s edge, the station-owner and

his wife and one shepherd lived, quite alone —their house a perfect picture of cleanliness and thrift: a stranger rarely, or never passed to tell them of the world; and it was said that every morning, as he passed-by from milking his few hardy cows, the old Highlander would salute his wife through the open window with this unvarying welcome: ‘Good morning, Mrs Hay,’ and she would answer as simply: ‘Good morning, Mr Hay.’” (To be Continued.)